When I heard that Obama’s Justice Department was going to try at least five of the alleged 9-11 suspects in New York City I couldn’t help but think of Coover’s novel. In the same way that the Rosenberg execution was a piece of political theatre designed to insure the US public that Washington had the over-hyped communist threat under control, this trial serves the purpose of convincing that same public that the terrorist threat is also being taken care of. During the trial and aftermath of the Rosenbergs, the US military was fighting a war in Korea and occupying a good portion of the world. Involvement in Vietnam on the side of the French was increasing and the ultra-right was relishing the publicity it had obtained thanks to Joe McCarthy and other anti-communist demagogues. Nowadays, the US military is fighting a war in Afghanistan, occupying Iraq and maintaining military bases around the world. The ultra-right is up to its usual publicity-seeking inanities and the economy is stumbling. It’s time for a unifying event. Since (thankfully) attacks on the US homeland don’t happen very often, the next best thing to rally the masses might very well be this trial.

Currently, there is a sideshow being whipped up by the rightwing that insists that the defendants should all be tried in military courts. Most of those not among that political minority disagree. The right has nothing to fear, however. Despite all the backslapping statements calling Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision a triumph for the American way of justice, justice is not really the issue in these upcoming trials. No, what’s at stake here for the empire reaches deeper than that. As far as the empire’s guardians are concerned, these trials are about the very nature of the American future. Convictions (and most likely executions of the condemned) are essential to the continuation of the project. Doubt must be purged. Naysayers must be silenced. The attorneys that end up defending these men will be vilified. If the defendants are, by some fluke, acquitted, the jury will live in fear of their own countrymen for a long time. The court itself will be an armed camp reminiscent of the prison in Guantanamo where the defendants were held for years without trial. The effects of any torture endured by the defendants will lurk underneath every accusation and piece of evidence presented.

Given that New York is still one of the top media capitals in the world, don’t look for a change of venue for these trials. The message here is not in the courtroom proceedings, but in the presentation of those proceedings. The Lady Justitia will be present, but the real force in this courtroom will be Nemesis, the god of vengeance. He has already made a difference, through the fact of the torture used by interrogators on the defendants. Getting the message that confuses justice with vengeance across will be the task of the media circus certain to ensue. The prosecution and their cohorts on the bench are depending on it.

From the trials in Salem to the hanging of the Haymarket Martyrs; from the deportations of the anarchists and other radicals during the Palmer Raids of the early twentieth century to the trials of antiwar and black liberation activists in the 1960s and 1970s, the history of the United States is full of these rituals of cleansing. It doesn’t matter if there are any truly guilty among the prosecuted and persecuted. It only matters that the national soul is cleansed and thereby able to begin its mission again–the mission referred to by everyone from John Winthrop in his discourses written on the passage to the new world to every president that ended his addresses with the words God Bless America. The city on the hill is still being built–now on a planetary platform. First, however, we must rid ourselves of those who don’t share our vision of that city but would tear it down. More importantly, we must get rid of the self-doubt among those citizens who think the cost is too high. Vengeance under the cover of justice is just the prescription demanded by Uncle Sam and his saints.

After so many years of setting the tone, bribing UK politicians and controlling the BBC they (Zionists) are used to being untouchable.
— Gilad Atzmon, “Britain Must de-Zionize Itself Immediately,” Nov. 17, 2009, MWC News).

This week the British people listened to the Daily Mail’s Peter Oborne present, on Channel 4, his devastating account of the Jewish lobby’s control of their government.¹ Now we know that virtually all the principal politicians in the UK of both parties, like their brothers across the lake in our House and Senate, take “contributions” from the Israeli lobby machine ensuring that the Anglo-American mid-east policies follow the dictates of the Israeli government. Gilad Atzmon responded to this report in his article “Britain must de-Zionise itself immediately,” noting that this control has been in place for so many years the lobby feels “untouchable.”

How many years are “many” one might ask? In 1941, the High Commissioner of Palestine, Harold MacMichael, Senior Palestine Mandate officer for the British Mandate forces in Palestine, sent the following “Top Secret” “Memorandum on the Participation of the Jewish National Institutions in Palestine in Acts of Lawlessness and Violence” to the Secretary of State, dated October 16th, a report prepared by The Palestine Police, Criminal Investigation Department:

The memorandum illustrates – indeed, brings into full limelight – the fact that the Mandatory is faced potentially with as grave a danger in Palestine from Jewish violence as it ever faced from Arab violence, a danger infinitely less easy to meet by the methods of repression which have been employed against Arabs. In the first place, the Jews … have the moral and political support … of considerable sections of public opinion both in the United Kingdom and the United States of America … all the influence and political ability of the Zionists would be brought to bear to show that the Jews in Palestine were the victims of aggression, and that a substantial body of opinion abroad would be persuaded of the truth of the contention.

Quite obviously, MacMichael understands that the Mandatory has little power at home over the zealous actions of the Zionists as they manipulate public and political opinion even as they expand their terrorism against the British Mandate government in Palestine. This is an untenable position to be in, responsible for government control and security of those under its authority, i.e., Palestinians as well as Jews, and knowing that the Jews are set on driving the British out of Palestine, and knowing that the home government can offer little help.

The Zionists and their “gangs,” a euphemism for well equipped and well trained military forces, launched a full scale terrorist rebellion against the British by robbing banks, indiscriminate killing of British police, and the assassination of British minister-resident Lord Moyne in 1944. By the end of World War II things got even worse: “The Haganah carried out anti-British military operations – liberation of interned immigrants from the Atlit camp; the bombing of the country’s railroad network; sabotage raids on radar installations and bases of the British police mobile force; sabotage of British vessels … and the destruction of all road and railroad bridges on the borders.” All of this terrorism was conducted against the Mandate Government while the home government remained silent under the pall of Israeli Zionist propaganda (Meir Pa’il, “From Hashomer to the Israel Defense Forces: Armed Jewish Defense in Palestine,” World War II).

But recording the acts of terrorism does not do justice to the conditions the Mandate government faced. MacMichael describes the reality of the forces aligned against the police in Palestine.

A second matter which deeply impressed me is the almost Nazi control exercised by the official Jewish organizations over the Jewish community, willy nilly, through the administration of funds from abroad, the issue of labor certificates in connection with the immigration quota, the forced contributions to funds and the power of the Histadruth. … The community is under the closed oligarchy of the Jewish official organizations which control Zionist policy and circumscribe the lives of the Jewish community in all directions…

Perhaps one of the most frightening observations MacMichael makes comes at the very end of his dispatch: “As matters now stand it seems to me inevitable that the Zionist Juggernaut which has been created with such intensity of zeal for a Jewish national state will be the cause of very serious trouble in the Near East.” Prophetic words indeed.

The memorandum provided by the Palestine Police Department includes approximately 500 pages of seized documents from the Jewish Agency and related organizations. These documents reveal the intention of the Zionists that controlled operations in Palestine as they worked to force into existence a Jewish State. “We regard it as our duty to caution you against any attempt to decide on an anti-Zionist solution … We regard it as a duty to utter another warning. Do not postpone the political solution for ten years … The Jews are a nation. The land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel. The Jewish State will be established. It is better that it should be established with your help and for your benefit, than against you” (The Jewish Resistance Movement, March 25th, 1946).

The Mandate Criminal Investigation Department was headed by Richard Catling. Catling’s memorandum begins with an understanding of the “intricate Jewish political, social and economic structure in Palestine.” A series of appendices chart these structures marking in passing that “… the Palestine Royal Commission Report of 1937 understood ‘The Agency (Jewish) is obviously not a governing body; it can only advise and cooperate in a certain wide field.’ But allied as it is with the Vaad Leumi, and commanding the allegiance of the great majority of the Jews in Palestine, it unquestionably exercises, both in Jerusalem and in London, a considerable influence on the conduct of government.” Catling’s frustration with the actual control of the Jews over British policy in Palestine glares through this document: “This powerful and efficient organization amounts in fact, to a government existing side by side with the Mandatory Government…”

The Zionist controlled Jewish Agency actively undermined the legal authority in Palestine even as it operated to undermine support for that government in Britain, placing UK forces in harms way as they attempted to fulfill their authorized responsibilities in Palestine. It also demonstrates the determination of the Agency’s leadership in undermining the very nation that gave it a means of establishing a “homeland” in Palestine through the Balfour Declaration. The wording of that declaration is rarely presented in its full form: “His Majesty’s government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” The declaration did not intend to establish a Jewish State. Indeed, the wording, “national home,” was used intentionally instead of “state.” Additionally, the first draft referred to the principle ‘that Palestine should be’ reconstituted ‘as the national home of the Jewish people.’ In the final text, the word ‘that’ was replaced with ‘in’ to avoid committing all of Palestine to the Jews only.

Now perhaps we can answer the question, “How many years has the British government been under the control of the Zionist influence?” Three score and ten, the biblical age. Perhaps it’s time that Britain is reborn, free from the shackles that bind it to this corrupt power that flouts international law, wantonly commits crimes against humanity, and in brazen arrogance tells the Nations United to shove its demands to comply with the civilized communities of the world.

Note: Sir Richard C. Catling’s files have been released to this writer by the chief Archivist of the Rhodes House Library of the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford University. Some of the material presented above comes from the “Introduction” of a yet to be published book due out this coming spring.

1. The documentary can be viewed here.

The Tamil people in Sri Lanka had expectations that they would achieve equal rights and power with the Sinhalese once independence was won from the British colonialists. As the independence movement was winning over colonialization there was no talk of any Tamil separatism.

Even before the defeat of the Axis powers, Britain prepared to decolonize Ceylon. In 1943, the colonial secretary of state stated that a constitution would be drafted will all parties involved. A condition would be that “The Parliament of Ceylon shall not make any law rendering persons of any community or religion liable to disabilities or restrictions to which persons of other communities are not made liable …”²

Britain established the Soulbury Commission in 1944. The leading Sinhalese politician was D.S. Senanayake—a conservative, who founded, in 1946, the rightist pro-independence and pro-capitalist United National Party (UNP). Senanayake became known as the “Father of Sri Lanka.” He convinced a leading Tamil politician, G.G. Ponnamblam—who founded the All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC), in 1944—to partake in independence negotiations.

Another provision of the Soulbury Commission (Constitution) was that any bill which evoked “serious opposition by any racial or religious community and which, in the opinion of the Governor-General is likely to involve oppression or serious injustice to any community must be reserved by the Governor-General.”

The vote on the third reading of the “Free Lanka” bill was supported by all the Muslim members and by most Tamil and Sinhalese groups. “Some of the other minority members who did not want to openly support the bill took care to be absent or abstain. Finally, the debate and the vote of acceptance on the eighth and ninth of September 1945 was the most significant indication of general reconciliation among the ethnic and regional groups. Far exceeding the 3/4 majority required by the Soulbury Commission, Senanayake had 51 votes in favor, and only three votes against the adoption of the constitution. The vote was ‘in many ways a vote of confidence by all communities…and the minorities were as anxious as the majority for self-government.’”

Senanayake’s speech in proposing the motion of acceptance made reference to the minorities and said … “throughout this period the Ministers had in view one objective only, the attainment of maximum freedom. Accusations of Sinhalese domination have been bandied about. We can afford to ignore them for it must be plain to every one that what we sought was not Sinhalese domination, but Ceylonese domination. We devised a scheme that gave heavy weightage to the minorities; we deliberately protected them against discriminatory legislation. We vested important powers in the Governor-General… We decided upon an Independent Public Service Commission so as to give assurance that there should be no communalism in the Public Service. I do not normally speak as a Sinhalese, and I do not think that the Leader of this Council ought to think of himself as a Sinhalese representative, but for once I should like to speak as a Sinhalese and assert with all the force at my command that the interests of one community are the interests of all. We are one of another, what ever race or creed.”

The first national election was held August 23-September 30, 1947. 1,887, 364 people voted for 95 MP (members of parliament). There were six parties and many independents. The results were:

UNP with 39.8% (42 MPs)

LSSP 10.8% (10)

BLPI 6% (5)

ACTC 4.4% (7)

CIC 3.8% (6)

CPC 3.7% (3)

Labor 1.4% (1)

Independents 29% (16)³

“We are one of another, whatever race or creed,” swore the “Father” of the new independent State. It looked good for all ethnic and religious groups, but then the deceit became evident with the new citizenship act.

On February 4, 1948, the new government introduced the Ceylon Citizenship Bill before Parliament. The outward purpose of the bill was to provide a means of obtaining citizenship, but I think its real purpose was to discriminate against the Indian Tamils by denying them citizenship. The Ceylon Citizenship Act no. 18, August 20, 1948 denied citizenship to 11% of the population.

Although the All Ceylon Tamil Congress opposed the bill, it had joined with the UNP. This provoked half of its members to form the Federal Party, led by SJV Chelvanayakam. Next year, the Indian and Pakistani Residents Act, no.3, disenfranchised nearly all Tamils, who were originally from India. Their seven MPs were kicked out of parliament and there were no Indian Tamils in the 1952 parliament elections. It wasn’t until 1988 that the Sri Lanka government granted citizenship to stateless persons, who hadn’t applied for Indian citizenship. In 2003, 168,141 descendants of Indian Tamils were allowed citizenship.

The new government allowed Sinhalese to appropriate land on the Tamil traditional homeland in the north and east. Entire villages were driven out—ethnic cleansing—which the Sinhalese settled, aiming to break a geographic continuity of the Tamil homeland.⁴ Within time, Sinhalese settlers had taken over 30% of Tamil lands and homes—a la Israel in Palestine.

In 1956, The Sinhala Only Act became law. It mandated Sinhala as “the sole official language”, which, at that time was spoken by 70% of the population.

Supporters of the law saw it as an attempt by a community that had just gained independence to distance themselves from their colonial masters, while its opponents viewed it as an attempt by the linguistic majority to oppress and assert dominance on minorities. The Act symbolizes the post independent majority Sinhalese to assert its Sri Lanka’s identity as a nation state, and for Tamils, it became a symbol of minority oppression and a justification for them to demand a separate nation state, which resulted in decades of civil war.

Tamils protested the discriminatory law by using Gandhian tactics of non-violent sit-ins. Although stated advocates of non-violence, Buddhist monks led Sinhalese mobs against Tamils.

The Gal Oya riots… were the first ethnic riots that targeted the minority Sri Lankan Tamils… The riots took place from June 11, 1956 and occurred over the next five days. Local majority Sinhalese colonists and employees of the Gal Oya settlement board commandeered government vehicles, dynamite and weapons and massacred minority Tamils… It is estimated that over 150 people lost their lives due in the violence. Although initially inactive, the Police and the Army were eventually able to re-take control of the situation and brought the riots under control.

Tamil political leader SJV Chelvanayagam began to organize a massive Satyagraha (non-violent resistance). In order to avoid even more bloodshed, Prime Minister Solomon Bandaranayaka signed an agreement with Chelvanayagam promising to restore Tamil as the (or one of two) official language(s) in its minority areas. This infuriated many Sinhalese, especially monks, and they assaulted and sometimes killed Tamils in many areas. Buddhist monks even besieged the official residence of Bandaranayaka demanding that he abandoned the agreement, which he did. But, in 1958, the Sinhalese-led parliament, pressed by the violence and the pro-Moscow and Trotskyist Sinhalese parties, passed an amendment to the Sinhala Only Act (called “Sinhala Only, Tamil Also”) restoring Tamil as a co-official language in their areas of the North and East. Frustrated at the compromise, Sinhalese mobs murdered 200-300 Tamils, including some Sinhalese who gave Tamils refuge. Many Tamil women were raped and some Tamil boys were stripped, bound, and burned alive. This violent hatred evokes the lynching and burning alive of black people by whites in the southern USA.

Some Buddhists were angry that the Sinhalese Prime Minister Bandaranayaka had tried to compromise with Tamils. In 1959, a Buddhist monk assassinated him.

The language law had its intended effect. In 1955, the civil service had been largely made of Tamils, who had benefited more than Sinhalese from western style education provided by missionaries. This fact was used by populist Sinhalese politicians to come to power—or retain power—on the promise of providing more civil service jobs to Sinhalese by demanding that their language be the only one used in public service. By 1970, the civil service was almost entirely Sinhalese. Thousands of Tamil civil servants were forced to resign due to lack of fluency in Sinhala. In the1960s, government forms and services were virtually unavailable to Tamils.

Confrontation became the modus operandi; Sinhalese were the Zionists and Tamils the Palestinians!

It is important to stress, especially with progressive-revolutionary governments, such as the ALBA alliance in Latin America, and their supporters throughout the world, that the Tamils’ history in Sri Lanka is one of constant and widespread discrimination. They are also subjects to a policy of genocide as defined by the United Nations.⁵

Sri Lanka made world headlines in 1960 when a woman, Sirimavo RD Bandaranaike, was elected prime minister—the world’s first female leader. Being the widow of the martyr and founder of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) was an asset. She immediately brought Sri Lanka into the Non-Alignment Movement, founded in 1961. The originators—India’s Nehru, Egypt’s Nasser, Yugoslavia’s Tito and Ghana’s Nkrumah—sought support for each other’s sovereignty without aligning with either super-power bloc at that time.⁶

Nevertheless, Sri Lankan leaders of both predominantly Sinhala major parties continued to be dependent upon economic and military ties with India, the US, the UK, and Israel. Social welfare programs were carried out within a capitalist economic structure. This was a cause for radical opposition. In 1971, thousands of Sinhalese students, and Indian Tamil plantation workers, under the leadership of a new nationalistic and Marxist-oriented political party, Janatha Vimukthi Peramana (JVP), translated as Peoples Liberation Front, engaged in anti-government clashes. Fifteen thousand protestors were killed in the uprising.

Once in power, Bandaranaike’s widow did not alter the Sinhalese policy of genocide: “…an ingenious device was resorted to deprive the Tamils of the constitutional safeguards and the characteristics of the conditional polity. A coalition of three Sinhalese political parties, led by Mrs. Sirimavo R.D.Bandaranaike, called upon the people to give a mandate [in the 1970 General Elections, during her second term] for a new Constituent Assembly to scrap the 1948 dominion polity and create a new Republic of Sri Lanka. Whilst the voters in the seven Sinhalese provinces gave Mrs.Bandaranaike the mandate that she had requested, the Tamil voters in the Northern and Eastern Provinces summarily rejected her call. In the North and East, a mere 14% of the votes polled supported the call for a new constituent Assembly.”

Laws protecting rights of racial and religious minorities were abandoned and Buddhism was made the constitutional religion of Sri Lanka.

Sinhalese claimed 5000 acres in the Tamil farmland “Nochikulam” as theirs, renaming it “Nochiyagama.” Next year, 10,738 Sinhalese families settled in Trincomalee illegally.

“The sovereignty of the Tamil people (who were ethnically, geographically and linguistically separately identifiable and distinct) revived.”

With this setback, a reinvigorated ACTC joined with the Federal Party, in 1972, to form the Tamil United Front (TUF). Separatism or autonomy now became the cry for nearly all Tamils, who sought an Eelam part of Sri Lanka. Thirty Tamil militant groups emerged.

“The operative part is Thamil Eelam and it means the Tamil part of Eelam. The term Eelam is a synonym for Sri Lanka and has been in use in Tamil literature right from the Cankam Period dating as far back as 200 B.C. to circa 250 A.D.”

The second government of Sirimavo Bandaranaike enacted a discriminatory double standard law for admission grades to universities, requiring Tamil students to achieve higher grades than Sinhalese.

Throughout the 1970s, Sinhalese mobs clashed—with impunity—not only with Tamils but also Muslim Moors. In 1976, Sinhalese burned 271 houses and 44 shops, murdering a score of Muslims.

In 1976, the Tamil United Front Party changed its name to the Tamil United Liberation Front (TUFP) at the Vattukottai Conference, and adopted a demand for an independent sovereign state in traditional Tamil homeland in the north and east to be known as the “secular, socialist state of Tamil Eelam.”⁷

By 1975, Tamil militancy increased with the birth of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), led by Velupillai Prabhakaran, who considered himself a Marxist and follower of Che Guevara. The LTTE engaged in small armed clashes with the military.

The conservative UNP won a landslide victory in the July 1977 elections. But the pro-independence TULF won 6.4% of the popular vote, winning all 14 seats in the Tamil homeland area, and four more seats of the 168-member parliament. In response to Tamil’s peaceful struggle and its parliamentary victory, Sinhalese mobs, led by Buddhist monks, again destroyed many Tamil homes and shops and murdered up to 300 Tamils.

In July 1978, the UNP, led by Prime Minister Junius Richard Jayewardene, changed the constitution and renamed the country the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. An executive presidency was established, allowing the president greater powers than the prime minister, whom the president now appoints. The president is also the commander-in-chief and head of the cabinet. He can dissolve parliament and has judicial impunity.

Jayewardene became the first president and appointed Ramasinghe Premadosa (UNP) prime minister. Despite the new name, “democratic socialist republic,” the capitalist government began deregulating much of what had been government run enterprises. Private enterprise was priority.

On May 31, 1981, the TULF held a rally in Jaffna in the north. Police clashed with Tamils and two policemen were killed. For three days, Sinhalese mobs, policemen, and soldiers went on a rampage. Several Tamils were taken from their homes and killed. The TULF headquarters, a newspaper office, presses, and shops were destroyed. Worst of all was the total destruction of the Jaffna library and its 97,000 volumes of books and irreplaceable historical manuscripts, some made of palm leaves. It is now well known that the fire that destroyed this unique institution of the Tamils in their homeland was masterminded by a handful of ministers of the Sinhala Government in Colombo, who were present in Jaffna the night of the fire.

“The national newspapers did not carry information about the incident and in subsequent parliamentary debates some majority Sinhalese members reminded minority Tamil politicians that if Tamils were unhappy in Sri Lanka, they should leave for their homeland in India. This is a direct quotation from United National Party member MP WJM Lokubandara:

“If there is discrimination in this land which is not their (Tamil) homeland, then why try to stay here? Why not go back home (India) where there would be no discrimination?”

“Twenty years later, the mayor of Jaffna, Nadarajah Raviraj, still grieved at the recollection of the flames he saw as a University student. He was later killed by unknown gunmen in the capital Colombo, in 2006.”

Civil War and LTTE

By summer 1983, the then small guerrilla army of LTTE was well settled in most northern and eastern areas. Their first major assault against the state’s military took place at Jaffna peninsula, July 24. LTTE ambushed a convoy of soldiers passing through land mines and killed 15.

This could have been in response to many random attacks upon Tamils in various areas. One example is in Trincomalee where, on 10 April 1983, a young Tamil died in police custody after having been held without charge for two weeks. At the judicial inquest into his death, on May 31, the Jaffna Magistrate returned a verdict of homicide. Three days later, the government changed the rules permitting the police to bury or cremate bodies without a post mortem or an inquest.

Amnesty International cabled President Jayawardene expressing concern that such a regulation could give rise to grave human rights violations and appealed to him to rescind it. But he did not. On the contrary, on June 3, 1983, the day that the new Emergency Regulation was brought into effect, the attacks on the Tamils in Trincomalee commenced in earnest.

R. Sampanthan, M.P. for Trincomalee, described that mobs of Sinhalese went from village to village setting fire to Tamil houses and shops. A particular modus operandi was observed. Heavily armed service personnel would enter a Tamil area and carry out a search alleging that explosions and dangerous weapons were hidden in that area. Invariably nothing would be recovered other than implements that would normally be available in any house. Sometimes Tamil youths would be arrested on “suspicion” and taken for questioning. After a month of many pogrom raids, the LTTE struck the army convoy.

That night and for weeks Sinhalese rampaged against Tamils, especially in the Colombo area where some Tamils youths were stripped naked and burned alive in petrol. Black July ended with between 2000 and 3000 dead Tamils, among them 53 prisoners, including key political leaders, who were murdered by Sinhalese prisoners at Welikadai. One political prisoner, Kuttimani, had his eyes gouged out and stomped upon under a soldier’s boots.

One hundred thousand Tamils were rendered homeless and that many and more fled to India.

Even non-violent advocates of separatism or independence, such as the TULF, were pushed out of the democratic process. The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, enacted in August 1983, classified all separatist movements as unconstitutional. That meant that all its members of parliament—16 then—lost their seats. Thousands of Tamil youth joined militant armed groups, especially the LTTE, which became the most disciplined and well organized.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the LTTE established a de facto state, called Tamil Eelam, and managed a government, which provided a judicial court system, a police force, and social assistance in health and education and for the poorest. LTTE ran a bank, a radio station (Voice of Tigers), even a television station. Guerrilla leaders helped organize small cooperative farming units based on traditional methods. The LTTE dismantled the caste system and officially stopped discrimination against women. The LTTE organized a civilian administration under its command. There was order and peace in these areas, as long as everyone obeyed and when the Sri Lanka army did not bomb.

In the 1980s, there was much discontent in other parts of Sri Lanka. Radical Sinhalese youths, such as the JVP, demanded going further towards socialism. In 1987, JVP engaged in another armed uprising. But after 1989, it entered into parliamentary politics. It participated in the 1994 parliamentary general election and joined conservative and liberal party coalitions in opposing equal rights with Tamils.

Ranasinghe Premadasa was prime minister from February 1978 to January 1, 1989, under President Jayewardene, and then he became president until his assassination on Mayday 1993. Many Sinhalese elitists thought he was too common to be their leader and too compromising with Tamils. Controversial policies under his terms included the matter of language, ethnic cleansing, and the role of India in internal affairs. The first controversy was the constitutional amendment allowing “equality” of languages in the Tamil areas: “National languages shall be Sinhala and Tamil,” although, “The official language of Sri Lanka shall be Sinhala. Tamil shall also be an official language. English shall be a link language.”

This compromise spoke in double tongues. Why not just make Sinhala and Tamil equally official, as India has done with a score of languages?

Alienated Tamils

Even a U.S. Library of Congress study characterized Tamils as alienated. In 1988, it published, SriLanka: a Country Study. In the chapter entitled, “Tamil Alienation,” the authors wrote:

Moderate as well as militant Sri Lankan Tamils have regarded the policies of successive Sinhalese governments in Colombo with suspicion and resentment since at least the mid-1950s, when the “Sinhala Only” language policy was adopted…

Several issues provided the focus for Sri Lankan Tamil alienation and widespread support, particularly within the younger generation, for extremist movements…Sinhalese still remained the higher-status “official language,” and inductees into the civil service were expected to acquire proficiency in it. Other areas of disagreement concerned preference given to Sinhalese applicants for university admissions and public employment, and allegations of government encouragement of Sinhalese settlement in Tamil-majority areas.

“Government-sponsored settlement of Sinhalese in the northern or eastern parts of the island, traditionally considered to be Tamil regions, has been perhaps the most immediate cause of inter-communal violence. There was, for example, an official plan in the mid-1980s to settle 30,000 Sinhalese in the dry zone of Northern Province, giving each settler land and funds to build a house and each community armed protection in the form of rifles and machine guns. Tamil spokesmen accused the government of promoting a new form of ‘colonialism’,” but the Jayewardene government asserted that no part of the island could legitimately be considered an ethnic homeland and thus closed to settlement from outside. Settlement schemes were popular with the poorer and less fortunate classes of Sinhalese.”

Che Guevara made no bones about the significance of alienation: “…the ultimate and most important revolutionary aspiration (is) to see man liberated from his alienation.”⁸

India’s Vacillating Role

The role of India in Sri Lanka’s civil war was a major problem. India’s Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, son of assassinated Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, first supported the LTTE. His air force even dropped 25 tons of aid in their territory in Jaffna (Operation Poomalai). A month following this, the Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Accord was signed between Gandhi and the reluctant Prime Minister Ranasinghe Presmadasa, under pressure from his president, JR Jayewardene. The July 29, 1987 accord was expected to resolve the ongoing civil war. Colombo agreed to devolution of power to the Tamil provinces, and its military was to withdraw in exchange for the Tamil rebels’ disarmament. The LTTE had not been made party to the talks but reluctantly agreed to surrender arms to the Indian Peace Keeping Force. Within a few months, however, both sides flared into an active confrontation. Indian soldiers died in far greater numbers than Tamil rebels: 1,500 killed and 4,500 wounded.

In January 1989, Premadasa was elected President on a popular platform promising that the Indian Peace Keeping Force would leave within three months. The police action was unpopular in India as well, especially with some 50 million Tamil Nadu people. Gandhi refused to withdraw India’s troops, however, believing that the only way to end the civil war was to politically force Premadasa and to militarily force the LTTE to accept the accord. But, in December 1989, Vishwanath Pratap Singh was elected India’s Prime Minister and completed the pullout.

On May 21, 1991, in an act of revenge over India’s militarist actions, a female LTTE member blew up Rajiv Gandhi in a suicide bomb attack. In 1992, India became the first government, even before Sri Lanka, to declare the LTTE a terrorist group.

President Premadasa resumed the civil war, which became stalemated. Many forces were angry with him, including a rival Sinhalese leader Lalith Athulathmudali, who sought an impeachment motion against Premadasa, in 1991. Lalith was an adamant supporter of Zionism.

When Athulathmudali, a pro-Israeli power broker, challenged Premadasa two years ago with an impeachment motion in the parliament, Premadasa openly accused Mossad, the intelligence agency of Israel, of trying to topple him. In his address to the Sri Lankan parliament, Premadasa said,

“…I had Israeli interests section removed. In such a context there is nothing to be surprised about the Mossad rising up against me. Please remember that there are among us traitors who have gone to Israeli universities and lectured there and earned dirty money…”

cited Sachi Sri Kantha, quoting the prime minister in “The Puzzles in President Premadasa’s Assassination Revisited.”

In April 1993, Athulathmudali was murdered. Eight days later, on Mayday, Premadasa was murdered. The LTTE did not claim responsibility for these assassinations but were so blamed by Sinhalese and the mass media.

“When Athulathmudali was assassinated last April, the members of his party immediately accused Premadasa for ordering the killing. The murder of Premadasa could have been a return hit planned and executed by the Mossad which had lost its major card in Sri Lankan politics.”

The second Eelam war lasted from 1989 until November 1994 when the People’s Alliance (led by SLFP) candidate, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, won the presidency. But peace negotiations broke down and the war continued from 1995 until the end of 2001 when ceasefire negotiations made progress. But not before the LTTE proved to the Sri Lanka government and military, with 230,000 well armed troops, that it was its equal. With somewhere around 5000 guerrillas—along with a small Sea Tigers boat unit, which made some pirate hits for funding, and even a few light civilian aircraft, the Sky Tigers, which sometimes made damaging raids against the Air Force—the LTTE won many military victories.

The Sri Lankan military often bombed civilian Tamils in the LTTE-controlled zones. It claimed that they were legitimate “collateral damage” given that the guerrillas allegedly forced them to remain against their will. The civilian hostage charge was widely reported as truth by the west and its mass media, as was the allegation that the LTTE forces children into armed combat.

On January 31, 1996, the LTTE stunned the nation when it bombed the Central Bank in Colombo, which managed most financial business accounts. One suicide bomber with 200 kilos of explosions drove through the main gate and exploded, wiping out many bank floors and several other buildings. Behind him came a vehicle with two cadres firing rifles and launchers. They escaped but were later captured. Material damage was tremendous but more so was the loss of 53 lives and injuries to 1,400 people, most of them not military targets.

On July 24, 1996, LTTE forces bombed a commuter train killing 70 Sinhalese civilians. By the end of the 1990s, both sides had killed tens of thousands of people. Civilians were targeted by both sides. The Tigers claimed that civilians were targeted only when associated with military installations. But some attacks, such as the train, were unjustifiable. Furthermore, the LTTE has often murdered other Tamils who also seek autonomy but were not part of the LTTE or had made public critiques. It has, for example, killed several leaders of the TULF.

On April 22, 2000 LTTE forces surprisingly overran Sri Lanka’s Elephant Pass military base on Jaffna. Over 1,000 troops were killed and huge quantities of arms and ammunition were taken.

On July 24, 2001, the LTTE again stunned the nation and the world when it attacked the only international airport and the nearby military base.

Around 3:30 am on July 24, 14 members of the LTTE Black Tiger suicide squad infiltrated Katunayake air base… After destroying electricity transformers to plunge the base in darkness they cut through the barbed wire surrounding the base to begin their assault. Using rocket propelled grenades, anti-tank weapons and assault rifles, the militants attacked the air force planes. They were not able to attack the aircraft in the hangars but did destroy eight military aircraft on the tarmac: three Nanchange K-8 trainer aircraft, one Mil Mi-17 helicopter, one Mil Mi-24 helicopter, two LAI Kfir fighter jets, and a Mig-27. Five K-8s and one MiG-27 were also damaged. A total of 26 aircraft were either damaged or destroyed in the attack.

Eight Tigers and three air force officers died in the battle at the air base. The six remaining LTTE members then crossed the runway to nearby Bandaranaike Airport. Using their weapons, they began blowing up any civilian aircraft they could find, which were all empty. One Airbus340 was destroyed by an explosive charge; an A330 was destroyed by a rocket fired from the control tower. In addition, an A320-200 and an A340-300 were damaged in the assault.”

All 14 guerrillas were killed, along with six Sri Lankan air force personnel and one soldier killed by friendly fire; 12 soldiers were injured, along with three Sri Lankan civilians and a Russian engineer… The cost of replacing the civilian aircraft was estimated at $350 million USD. The attack caused a slowdown in the economy of Sri Lanka, to about -1.4%. Tourism also plummeted, dropping 15.5% at the end of the year.

Cease Fire

During two decades of civil war, the LTTE had several times offered a ceasefire on the condition of negotiations to establish peace and ethnic equality. With this military victory, the guerrilla army offered a unilateral ceasefire. Some national voices and many international ones were also pressing for a ceasefire. Norway took concrete steps, but it was this spectacular military victory and the loss to the economy that forced the government to the bargaining table.

The formal Ceasefire Agreement (CFA) was signed on February 22, 2002. Prime Minister Ranil Wickremasinghe and LTTE leader Velupillai Pirabakaran signed the agreement, alongside mediator Jan Petersen representing Norway’s foreign ministry.

Provisions provided for each side holding their ground positions. Neither side was to engage in any offensive military operation or move munitions into the area controlled by the other side.

The LTTE proposed an Interim Self-Government Authority (ISGA) to administer the Tamil homeland, pending final agreement and elections. The ceasefire was monitored by the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission. It was staffed by designees from Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland. The US, UK and other EU countries had observers. Headquarters were established in Colombo, and there were 60 monitors in six district teams and two naval ones. The SLMM monitored violations and mediated between the two parties but could not enforce sanctions. Many Sinhalese considered the Monitoring Mission, especially Norway, of being partial to the Tigers.

During the ceasefire, progress was made in agricultural development and general infrastructure in the Tamil Homeland. Many foreigners were invited to observe and participate in building Tamil Eelam. Impressive first-hand accounts have been written about the progress in many areas: administrative, economic and a social welfare network. While voices friendly to this process praised the advances made, many also questioned the lack of civilian input in the decision-making process.

The LTTE did not emphasize an international political solidarity movement. It did appeal for economic donations, which poured to it, especially from Tamils in the Diaspora. The LTTE stopped speaking of Marxism or building a socialist independent state. It emphasized winning militarily—if Sri Lanka continued preventing an autonomous Tamil homeland—and constructing a social welfare state with cooperative and private enterprises. The Tigers became so respectable they could openly purchase weaponry from some countries not directly under the thumb of US-EU-Israel or their partial antagonists: China, Iran and Pakistan. A May 29, 2009 Times Online piece quotes the editor of Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Centre, saying that the LTTE used 11 merchant ships to deliver weapons, many of which they got from Bulgaria, Ukraine, Cyprus, Thailand and Croatia. Even the World Bank recognized the LTTE as an unofficial State, according to its representative in Sri Lanka, Peter Harrold, in 2005.

The LTTE was even building a Tamil University where Tamils in the Diaspora would have taught. I spoke with one of them, a man who had earned a doctorate degree in environmental science and taught in European universities. He frequently visited the homeland he had left three decades previously. He hoped that he would return and teach once the university would be opened.

An activist in independence forces using peaceful methods, he wished to remain anonymous. His impressions were that the Tigers were the dominating factor in civilian administration but that as long as no one objected one felt safe in the Homeland areas whenever Colombo’s armed forces were not bombing. He was critical that the LTTE armed forces had resorted to terrorist methods in their history, such as assassinating political critics. The professor, however, did not think the LTTE forced children into combat or used civilians as human shields, generally.

“Tigers were good people, intelligent and sensitive to people and nature. But contradictions did exist. They were a strange animal.”

Cease Fire Ends

On December 26, 2004, the greatest earthquake-tsunami ever recorded (9.3) hit Southeast Asia. Eleven countries were deeply affected: 230,000 were killed or missing. Sri Lanka was one of the worst disasters. About 40,000 people were killed or missing; 1.5 million were displaced from their homes. International aid poured in but did not arrive in the North and East due to Sinhalese political party opposition. The LTTE organized all the aid it could muster for hundreds of thousands in the Tamil homeland. Foreign volunteers and emergency relief organizations praised the LTTE for its effective and caring work. There are many accounts of this.

Mahinda Rajapakse was appointed prime minister April 6, 2004, and then elected President on November 19, 2005 with just 50.3% of the vote. He was the pro-war candidate of a new coalition, the United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA). Tamil political parties and many foreign relief groups accused Rajapakse of diverting Tsunami relief funds designated for their homeland. In this complex reality, those parties most adamant about refusing aid to suffering Tamils and who demanded an end to the ceasefire with the objective of launching an all-out war were those claiming to be either hard-core Marxist-Communist-Trotskyists or self-proclaimed non-violent Buddhists.

“United People’s Freedom Alliance [is] undoubtedly the broadest coalition of progressive forces in the country. This coalition, which came into being in 2004 upon a platform of new liberal socio economic program and a resolve to defeat separatist terrorism, has since mobilized people around a social democratic agenda.”

This coalition is not just made up of alleged “progressives” but of “social” capitalists and self-styled “democratic socialists.” At the start, the coalition parties were: Sri Lanka Freedom Party, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, Sri Lanka Mahajana Pakshaya, Muslim National Unity Alliance, Mahajana Eksath Peramuna, Democratic United National Front, and Desha Vimukthi Janatha Party.

The Communist Party of Sri Lanka and the Lanka Sama Samaja Party signed a memorandum of understanding with the SLFP so their candidates would take part in parliamentary elections in the new coalition. They also joined the UPFA. On April 2, 2004, the alliance won 45.6% of the popular vote and took 105 out of 225 seats.

A Buddhist political party, the Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU), was founded in February 2004 and participated in the 2004 parliamentary elections, winning 6% of the vote for nine seats. In 2007, it formally joined the hodge-podge UPFA coalition government and was given a ministry post.

On April 3, 2008, JHU’s leader gave his reasons for warring against Tamils to the United States government financed Voice of America radio station.

Athurliye Rathana, a Buddhist monk who heads the Jathika Hela Urumaya party in Sri Lanka’s parliament, wants to end the suffering by putting a quick end to the war. Speaking with VOA at a seaside hotel in this former tourist haven, Rathana says he supports the government’s latest military offensive to quash the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

“Anytime a militant group is harmful to peaceful people, then government should have the right to exercise constitutional law and order,” Rathana said. “And, LTTE is unlawful and so, under our constitutional law, anyone cannot exercise militancy. But [with] the LTTE separatist movement, the government has some duty to control their military activities. I say only one thing, ‘Please do your duty.’”

For comments like that, the Sri Lankan media has branded Rathana the “war monk,”… his sentiments are common in Sri Lanka’s majority ethnic Sinhala community.

Rathana is a celebrated figure in this predominantly Buddhist nation, where monks are cherished for their spiritual guidance. The pro-war activism of Rathana and others has spurred as many as 30,000 Sinhalese young men to join the army in the past few months.

The UPFA alliance of apparently conflicting ideologies and economic policies is so strange that one can easily be confused about who is who and why their politics are such that they are. After a month’s research, having begun as a total novice to this region, I am unclear about why various political forces take the position they do not only about the Tigers but about the entire Tamil ethnic group. For many Sinhalese, an engrained racism is clearly a major motivation. But how can one explain that a Tamil group, Eelam People’s Democratic Party, also takes part in this coalition of Sinhalese racists? The EPDP is a paramilitary group fighting against the LTTE alongside the government. It even has one member in parliament. EPDP also assassinates civilians, including BBC reporter Nimalarajan Mylvaganam.

The Cease Fire Agreement was a thorn in the side of the new ruling coalition. Although the government claimed that the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission favored the Tiger guerrillas, its monitors had lodged 3006 violations committed by the LTTE and only 133 by the government, as of June 30, 2005. From May 2006 onward to its termination in January 2008, the Monitoring Mission was hampered by worsening hostilities, especially following a Sea Tiger boat attack on a navy convoy, May 11, 2006.

The European Union then placed the Tigers on its terrorist list, while appearing to be even-handed by calling upon the Sri Lankan government to end its “culture of impunity” and to “curb violence” in its areas of control.

Sweden, Finland and Denmark, as members of EU, also considered the Tigers to be terrorists, and the LTTE objected to their membership on the Monitoring Mission. They withdrew leaving only Norway and Iceland with 20 monitors. The reduced Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission disbanded in 2008. The path for a full war was clear.

1. John Pilger, “Distant Voices, Desperate Lives,” New Statesman, May 13, 2009.
2. See Article 29 of Soulbury Commission.
3. LSSP=Ceylon Equal Society Party comprised of Sinhalese Trotskyists; BLPI=Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India also Trotskyists; CIC=Ceylon Indian Congress, which soon changed its name to Ceylon Workers Congress, represented the Indian Tamils of the Estates Workers Trade Union; CPC, the Communist Party of Ceylon, with a pro-Moscow line; Labour was fashioned after Clement Attlee-led British Labour party. The Marxist parties later colluded with capitalist Sinhalese parties in opposing equality with Tamils. The CPC is now the Communist Party of Sri Lanka, which is part of the United People’s Freedom Alliance that includes the Sri Lanka Freedom Party-led government of Mahinda Rajapaksa.
4. “The Unspeakable Truth,” British Tamil Forum, 2008, p.8.
5. See part 1, “Justice for Sri Lanka Tamils.”
6. In 1976, Colombo was the summit site. In 1979, the Havana Declaration ensured “the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries” in their struggle against “imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism and racism.” In 2006, there were 118 member nations, representing 55% of the world’s population. Many of these nations have been at war with one another, and many have aligned with one or other of the previous super-powers.
7. My reading of Tamil history shows many discrepancies in dates and events. Different writings on the LTTE contend it was created at different times, either in 1972, 1975 or 1976.
8. Che Guevara, Socialism and man, Marcha, Uruguay, March 12, 1965.

Sri Lanka’s first aborigines with continuous lineage are the Tamil people. It is not precisely known when they came to the island, but perhaps as many as 5000 years ago. Archaeologists date the first humans in Sri Lanka to some 34,000 years. Scientists call them Balangoda people, the name of the location where artifacts were found. These hunting-gathering cave dwellers have no current lineage.

Tamils were also known as proto-Elamites or Ela. These people in Sri Lanka call themselves Eelam Tamils, meaning “earthly people”. Tamils speak a Dravidian language, which has no ties to other language families. It was, perhaps, associated with Scythians and Urals. The Dravidian language and Tamils originated, perhaps, from Sumer and Ur: the “cradle of the first civilization”, now Iran. The Sumer and Tamils formed the first language of proto-grams on clay tablets. Tamil inscriptions and literature are at least 2500 years old. Today, 100 to 200 million people speak Tamil.¹

The Christian Bible refers to Elam as “maritime nations in various lands, each with a separate language”. (Genesis 10) In the myth of Noah’s Ark, Elam was thought to be a descendant of one of Noah’s three sons on the ark. (Genesis 5-9) Tamils were the first to use the wheel for transportation. They traveled to India and the island Sri Lanka, which had been connected to India. The first known manuscripts in India were written in Tamil. Other Tamil inscriptions have been found in Egypt and Thailand.

About 2500 years ago, the first Sinhalese came to Sri Lanka from India. This was hundreds of years after Tamils were settled in the kingdom in the north at Jaffna (Yazhpanam). Sinhalese is, perhaps, a term originating from King Vijayan, who was expelled from the kingdom of Sinhapura in India and arrived in Sri Lanka 543 BC. He and his people engaged in combat with the Tamil aborigines. They established the Kandi and Kottai kingdoms in the central and southern areas.

The Sinhalese are among many ethnic groups who speak an Indo-Aryan language, Pali, believed to have developed in Sindh, Gujarat and Bengal areas about 3000 years ago. They early became practitioners of Buddhism, an off-shot of Hinduism, which is the religion that most Tamils adopted. Buddhism was created by the prince, Siddhartha Gautama, in the 6th century BC. Most Sinhalese adopted Buddhism but some were converted to Christianity, which was first introduced by traders from Syria, in the 1st or 2nd century after Christ.

The Sinhalese and Tamils have distinct ethnic backgrounds, languages and religions. The vast majority of both peoples has always lived in separate regions of Sri Lanka and they have often been at war. The Sinhalese adopted the chauvinistic attitude that their language and religion were the only true ones and they must reign throughout Sri Lanka. All other religions were alien. This notion seems to have originated, or been fortified, by the historical poem Mahavamsa (“Great Chronicle”) written in Pali by the Buddhist monk Mahatera Mahanama. It covers nearly one thousand years of Sinhalese kingdom history in Sri Lanka.

Sinhalese maintain that Sri Lanka must be a Buddhist nation because, they claim, it has been so throughout history—although they count the beginning of national history with Mahanama’s account of the first Sinhalese kingdom of Vijaya, in 543 BC. The fact that Tamil Eelams had kingdoms in Sri Lanka for many hundreds of years is ignored.

When the first Europeans, Portuguese traders, landed in Sri Lanka, in 1505, they encountered three native kingdoms: two Sinhalese kingdoms at Kottai and Kandi, and the Tamils in Jaffna peninsula. Although the Portuguese were traders, they brought fire power and eventually seized power militarily from the Kottai kingdom. Despite their superior weaponry, it took them decades to defeat the kingdoms at Jaffna and Kandi, yet resistance remained throughout Portuguese occupation. The Portuguese named the island Ceilão, which the English later transliterated as Ceylon.

In 1658, Dutch invaders arrived. The Dutch United East India Company sided with the Kandi resistance to defeat the Portuguese. But when the natives realized the Dutch sought total control, the Kandians organized guerilla warfare. In 1766, the Dutch took sovereignty over the entire coastline but not the entire island where some Tamils and Sinhalese remained independent.

In 1795, the British landed and kicked out the Dutch within a year. They realized there were two separate nations of natives. In June 1796, the British Colonial Secretary, Sir Hugh Cleghorn wrote to his government:

“Two different nations, from a very ancient period, have divided between them the possession of the Island: the Sinhalese inhabiting the interior in its southern and western parts from the river Wallouwe to Chilaw, and the Malabars (Tamils) who possess the northern and eastern districts. These two nations differ entirely in their religion, language and manners.”

It took the Brits a generation to defeat resisting natives. In 1811, they defeated Bandara Vanniyan and his guerrilla resisters in the Tamil Vanni territory. In 1815, the British finally captured the last of the Kandyan kingdom.

The European invaders were only interested in the riches they could steal. They converted the peasant based agricultural economy into an export one. The island was rich in cinnamon and other spices, coconuts and graphite. English colonialists converted much of the land into tea, coffee and rubber plantations.

Religion was used by the colonialists to dominate and pacify the natives. The Portuguese spread Catholicism in an organized manner. Some Tamils and some Sinhalese converted or were forced to convert. Both the Dutch and English continued the process with their Protestant missionaries, yet most natives held onto their beliefs in either Buddhism or Hinduism. Islamism was also introduced by Arab traders.

“Sri Lanka as British-ruled Ceylon was subjected to a classic divide-and-rule,” wrote John Pilger.

The English had to have their tea so they created tea plantations in the mountainous regions, especially in the center of the country where Sinhalese lived. But Sinhalese would not work them so the Brits “brought Tamils from India as virtual slave labor while building an educated Tamil middle-class to run the colony,” continued Pilger.² Only a few indigenous Tamils, however, ran anything, but some educated ones took the opportunity to sit on top of the bottom castes.

A hierarchy of “races”, classes and castes was perpetrated among native ethnic groups and new arrivals. In the mid-1800s, English and German scholars adopted an ideology of superiority first based on language and then on race. The English viewed Sinhalese as cousins in the large Aryan family. Brits (and Germans) were the “superior” white Aryans; the Sinhalese lesser Indo-Aryans, and Tamils were the colonized proletariat, the “black inferior race.” This fit in nicely with the Sinhalese elite notion of superiority, based on their precious book of mythology, Mahavamsa. In the 1870s, a German scholar, Max Muller, writing about language origins, especially Indo-Aryan, first coined the term “Aryan race”—something he later regretted.³

Europeans took it for granted that Greek and Latin were superior languages, and they saw affinities with Sanskrit, from which Sinhalese is derived. Given this identity, it was easier for the colonialists to drive a wedge deeper between the indigenous peoples, and all the more so by allowing Sinhalese to own land without having to work the British tea and rubber plantations in the center of the country. The Brits left the aboriginal Tamils stay in their homeland in the north and east, but brought between 800,000 and 1.5 million Tamils from India to work the fields; nearly one-fourth died in route. It is estimated that 70,000 Tamil Nadu died on route in the 1840s. Their story parallels that of Africans forced into slavery and brought to the Americas.

Ironically, it was protestant missionaries who contributed greatly to the development of political awareness among Tamils in the north and east, and led to a revival of the Hindu faith as a reaction against Christian domination. We find many examples of this in modern history, such as the increasing interest among Arabs in practicing strict Islamic customs, including separate gender rules, as a reaction to the invasions and occupations of Western imperialism in the Middle-East. Something similar is occurring in Palestine in response to the apartheid enforced by Zionist Jews.

Led by revivalist Arumuga Navalar in the mid-1800s, Tamils in the north and east built their own schools, temples, associations and presses. Literacy was used to spread Hinduism and its principles. Tamils published their own literature and newspapers to counter the ideology-religion of the missionaries. Tamils thought confidently of themselves as a community, thus lending to the legitimacy of their later assertion of the necessity to be treated equally with the Sinhalese or be granted—or take—their own autonomy as Eelam Tamils.

For some of the time that Britain ruled the island different colonial governors recognized equality of the native peoples, yet played one against the other. In 1833, the British mandated the administrative unification of the country while incorporating the different native administrative structures that existed earlier. The new legislative council was composed of three Europeans and one representative from the Sinhalese, the Ceylon Tamils and the Burghers—a Euro-Asian minority, Creole descendants of European colonialists who spoke a mixture of Indo-Portuguese. They had been converted to Protestantism.

Tamil laborers brought from India had no say nor did the few Arab Muslims. Racist Sinhalese massacred many in 1915. In 1930, another hard-working minority, Malayali plantation workers, were attacked by Sinhalese and most fled back to Kerala.

In 1921, the colonialists altered the legislative council so that Sinhalese acquired 13 seats to three for the Tamils. From here on out, Tamils developed a communal consciousness as a minority. In 1931, the Brits changed the rules again by incorporating the notion of universal franchise—one man one vote including for castes. Most Sinhalese opposed this progressive measure, seeking to maintain classes and castes while agreeing to part of the rule allowing them, as the majority, to have a decisive say over the minority Tamils. The issue of representative power-sharing, and not the structure of government, was used by nationalists of both communities to create an escalating inter-ethnic rivalry, which has been the dominant trend since.

Britain’s vacillating ruling strategy throughout their 150 year domination led to sporadic episodes of violence between Sinhalese and Tamils, often expressed as religious conflicts between Buddhists, Hindus, Christians and Muslims. More often than not, it was Buddhists who first attacked other ethnic peoples who held other faiths. The Brits often held police on the sidelines.

In the 1930s, and especially during World War II, Sinhalese and Tamils spoke out for independence. Various left-wing parties and coalitions arose, and some conservative groupings as well. Many natives hoped for a German victory over the hated English colonialists.

Tamils struggled to have their language placed on equal terms with Sinhalese, and replace English as the official language. Some Sinhalese leaders agreed but many did not. In 1939, a Tamil leader, G.G. Ponnambalam, spoke against the common Sinhalese notion, taken from the Mahavamsa, that their language should be the only official language and Buddhism the only official religion. Angry at the speech, Sinhalese mobs bashed and killed many Tamils. This time the British stopped the riots, but the roots to the upcoming 26-year long civil war had been laid.

Once WW II ended, the British Empire realized it had to give in to so many native peoples struggling for sovereignty. India won dominion status in 1947, a slight reform until full independence in 1950. The civil disobedience movement led by Mahatma Gandhi had succeeded yet he was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist on January 30, 1948. Gandhi sought unity among all Indians, but most Muslims wanted their own State after colonialism. Many Muslims were killed in riots; many lost their homes. Gandhi believed it morally correct for India to compensate them with finances. Many Hindu nationalists opposed this, and it led to his murder.

Great numbers of Hindus in India discriminated against non-Hindus just as Buddhist Sinhalese discriminate against Hindus and Muslims. The percentage of Tamils in Sri Lanka has been reduced from 30% to 12.6%. Tens of thousands have been murdered before and during the recent war, and as many as one million have fled the country, part of a massive Diaspora, like the Jews.⁴

1. This condensed history is gleaned from many sources: author Maravanpulavu K. Sachithananthan; Latin American Friendship Association, Tamilnadu, India; Wikipedia: many articles about Tamil Eelam, Sri Lanka and their histories, religions and languages; Tamilnation.org and many other sections in this comprehensive Tamil self-determination website. I am uncertain about the exactitude of origins, who came first, specific dates, or how to determine linguistic lineages. The record is unclear. But what is clear is that Sinhalese have judged and treated Tamils as inferior beings.
2. John Pilger, “Distant Voices, Desperate Lives,” New Statesman, May 13, 2009.
3. See chapter 13. “Understanding the Aryan Theory,” by Marisa Angell, a Usamerican Jew. The chapter is part of Culture and Politics of Identity in Sri Lanka, edited by Mithran Tiruchelvam and Dattathreya C.S., published by International Center for Ethnic Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka, 1998.
4. Current population statistics of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka—so named since 1978—show a population of 21 million people. 74% (15 million) Sinhalese; 12.6% (2.5 million) Tamil; 7.4% (1.5 million) Moors; 5.2% (1 million) Indian Tamil. 93% of Sinhalese are Buddhists, and the remainder Christian. 60% Tamils are Hindus, 28% are Muslim and 12% Christian.

Over the past few years a growing number of white people have joined the longstanding indigenous people’s critique of the holocaust denial that is at the heart of the Thanksgiving holiday. In two recent essays, I have examined the disturbing nature of a holiday rooted in a celebration of the European conquest of the Americas, which means the celebration of the Europeans’ genocidal campaign against Indigenous people that is central to the creation of the United States.

Many similar pieces have been published in predominantly white left/progressive media, while indigenous people continue to mark the holiday as a “National Day of Mourning.”

In recent years I have refused to participate in Thanksgiving Day meals, even with friends and family who share this critical analysis and reject the national mythology around manifest destiny. In bowing out of those gatherings, I would often tell folks that I hated Thanksgiving. I realize now that “hate” is the wrong word to describe my emotional reaction to the holiday. I am afraid of Thanksgiving. More accurately, I am afraid of what Thanksgiving tells us about both the dominant culture and much of the alleged counterculture.

Here’s what I think it tells us: As a society, the United States is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt. This is a society in which even progressive people routinely allow national and family traditions to trump fundamental human decency. It’s a society in which, in the privileged sectors, getting along and not causing trouble are often valued above honesty and accountability. Though it’s painful to consider, it’s possible that such a society is beyond redemption. Such a consideration becomes frightening when we recognize that all this goes on in the most affluent and militarily powerful country in the history of the world, but a country that is falling apart — an empire in decline.

Thanksgiving should teach us all to be afraid.

Although it’s well known to anyone who wants to know, let me summarize the argument against Thanksgiving: European invaders exterminated nearly the entire indigenous population to create the United States. Without that holocaust, the United States as we know it would not exist. The United States celebrates a Thanksgiving Day holiday dominated not by atonement for that horrendous crime against humanity but by a falsified account of the “encounter” between Europeans and American Indians. When confronted with this, most people in the United States (outside of indigenous communities) ignore the history or attack those who make the argument. This is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.

In left/radical circles, even though that basic critique is widely accepted, a relatively small number of people argue that we should renounce the holiday and refuse to celebrate it in any fashion. Most leftists who celebrate Thanksgiving claim that they can individually redefine the holiday in a politically progressive fashion in private, which is an illusory dodge: We don’t define holidays individually or privately — the idea of a holiday is rooted in its collective, shared meaning. When the dominant culture defines a holiday in a certain fashion, one can’t pretend to redefine it in private. To pretend we can do that also is intellectually dishonest, politically irresponsible, and morally bankrupt.

I press these points with no sense of moral superiority. For many years I didn’t give these questions a thought, and for some years after that I sat sullenly at Thanksgiving dinners, unwilling to raise my voice. For the past few years I’ve spent the day alone, which was less stressful for me personally (and, probably, less stressful for people around me) but had no political effect. This year I’ve avoided the issue by accepting a speaking invitation in Canada, taking myself out of the country on that day. But that feels like a cheap resolution, again with no political effect in the United States.

The next step for me is to seek creative ways to use the tension around this holiday for political purposes, to highlight the white-supremacist and predatory nature of the dominant culture, then and now. Is it possible to find a way to bring people together in public to contest the values of the dominant culture? How can those of us who want to reject that dominant culture meet our intellectual, political, and moral obligations? How can we act righteously without slipping into self-righteousness? What strategies create the most expansive space possible for honest engagement with others?

Along with allies in Austin, I’ve struggled with the question of how to create an alternative public event that could contribute to a more honest accounting of the American holocausts in the past (not only the indigenous genocide, but African slavery) and present (the murderous U.S. assault on the developing world, especially in the past six decades, in places such as Vietnam and Iraq).

Some have suggested an educational event, bringing in speakers to talk about those holocausts. Others have suggested a gathering focused on atonement. Should the event be more political or more spiritual? Perhaps some combination of methods and goals is possible.

However we decide to proceed, we can’t ignore the ugly ideological realities of the holiday. My fear of those realities is appropriate but facing reality need not leave us paralyzed by fear; instead it can help us understand the contours of the multiple crises — economic and ecological, political and cultural — that we face. The challenge is to channel our fear into action. I hope that next year I will find a way to take another step toward a more meaningful honoring of our intellectual, political, and moral obligations.

As we approach Thanksgiving Day, I’m eager to hear about the successful strategies of others. For such advice, I would be thankful.

‘Daisy Cutters and Poppy Wearers.’ Some people may be wondering what this means.

The Daisy Cutter is the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the American armoury.

Even larger bombs are currently being developed. The Daisy Cutter has an explosion similar to a small nuclear or atomic bomb. They say that when one was dropped in Iraq, the explosion lit up the entire front. Many Iraqi soldiers defected after seeing that bomb.

Several of these were dropped in Afghanistan, especially in the battles of Tora Bora.

Tony Blair is an example of a poppy-wearer. The poppy represents international peace. I got the idea for the title of this article from a cartoon I saw in one of the national newspapers. It was at the time when daisy-cutters were being dropped in Afghanistan and it was international peace day. The cartoon depicted a picture of Tony Blair wearing a poppy and an explosion behind him. The caption simply read: ‘Daisy-cutter…Poppy-wearer’.

We are entering an age where the visual media is gaining increasing influence on human societies, especially the 24-hour news channels, which have now become the most popular of all channels. A lot has been written about the shaping of public opinion.¹

I would like to mention some of the things that characterize the visual news media.

First, thought and emotion control. By relying upon the global news channels for information, the public tacitly allow themselves to be influenced in their thoughts and opinions about global events, on the spurious assumption that such information is unbiased and ‘independent’. A more ominous recent development, possibly, was illustrated by the case of Princess Diana’s death. The virtually unending media coverage generated the huge public outpouring of grief, so uncharacteristic of the British people. Individuals who would not normally have paid the story much of a second thought were influenced by the unceasing media coverage, repeatedly telling them how devastated they (the British public) were, that they found themselves believing it and even feeling it.

News channels have short memories. This was partly my reason for writing this article. The material we are currently seeing on the news channels about Afghanistan, the Taliban and the war — it is as if everything that led up to that point has been forgotten. The comments being made about the Taliban seem as if they come from a vacuum, as if everything that has led up to this point has been erased from the public mind.

When most people think about the Taliban and opium, they have the impression that the Taliban are heavily involved in the opium trade. That is in fact the message that is coming through from the media at the current time, sometimes through hints, and sometimes more explicitly. Whereas, in reality, as we shall see, the Taliban were responsible for stopping the opium production in Afghanistan and reducing it to zero.

The Pentagon now spends more than $550m on what it calls ‘public affairs’, not including personnel costs. So huge amounts of money are being put by the American military into what is referred to as ‘perception management.’ It involves manipulating and using the media to convey a certain message. I will present a couple of examples of this.

It is clear that the media is not a neutral institution. For example, Tony Blair met Rupert Murdoch three times in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. Rupert Murdoch owns large sections of the western news media, including Fox News, Sky, the Times newspaper, the Sun, News of the World, at least one of the large American newspapers and much of the Australian news media.

Although ‘Muslim’ channels such as the Emirates’ Al-Jazeera, Pakistan’s Geo News, and others, may superficially give the impression of being pro-Muslim, this is certainly not the case. In fact, there is little difference between such channels and mainstream UK or US news channels. These Arab or Pakistani news channels represent the secular, westernised tier of those societies. Despite the differing national allegiances, they ultimately share common values with their ex-colonial masters, i.e., democracy, secularism and often a belief in a capitalist economy. However, it should be remembered that this West-imitating class is a minority in Muslim countries.²

An example of how the news media has been responsible for manipulating public opinion occurred prior to the war against Iraq, when Iraq had invaded Kuwait. Prior to the American and British led attack, there was a widely reported story of Iraqi soldiers killing Kuwaiti babies. At a congressional human rights caucus, a young woman called Nayirah relayed a shocking story of what she had allegedly witnessed. The press latched on to the story, and the initial account of fifteen babies was soon exaggerated in sectors of the press up to 312. Several members of congress said that this story had influenced their vote to approve the military action against Iraq. President Bush frequently mentioned it in the lead up to the war. In the Senate, six senators specifically cited the story in their speeches supporting the resolution to give Bush authorization to use American forces in Kuwait.³

Shortly after the war ended, it became clear that this story was fabricated. ABC News and Amnesty International amongst others reported that there was no evidence that this had occurred. Finally, the New York Times made the shocking revelation that Nayirah was in fact the 15-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in America.

Similarly, before Iraq was invaded following the September 11th attacks, most Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was somehow behind 9/11 or that he was directly linked to Al Qaeda, despite the fact that no such link existed. In fact, Salafi jihadist groups such as Al Qaeda (supposing we assume that such an organisation substantially exists outside of its media construct) are ideologically vehemently opposed to secular leaders like Hussein, considering them to be apostates, worse than ‘disbelievers.’⁴

Some polls found that 7 in 10 Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in September 11th attacks. This public attitude was engineered by the state department. President Bush, Dick Cheney and co were hinting at links between the two in public speeches. The journal Perspectives on Politics published a study in which they looked at this issue. The authors mention: “Our analysis of Bush’s speeches reveals that the administration consistently connected Iraq with 9/11…” They go on to mention how the media colluded with the Bush et al.: “New York Times coverage of the president’s speeches featured almost no debate over the framing of the Iraq conflict as part of the war on terror. This assertion had tremendous influence on public attitudes, as indicated by polling data from several sources.”⁵

This eventually led to Iraq being invaded.

History of the Global Opium Industry

Now, going into the main subject of the article, I am going present you with two historical narratives and they interlink. One of them is the history of the global opium/heroin trade. The other is the story of the Taliban. Part of the intention of this presentation is just to remind people of historical facts. I will not indulge in conspiracy theory or anything of that sort; I simply wish to mention historical realities and allow people to judge the facts for themselves. The information about the Taliban is drawn from sources that are in not in any way pro-Taliban. The two main books to which I refer are The Taliban by Ahmad Rashid, which many western leaders were reading (it was said to be Tony Blair’s bedside reading leading up to the war), and Reaping the Whirlwind by a journalist called Michael Griffin. Neither author is a fan of the Taliban

I present the reader with historical facts which are often obscured or omitted from our dominant sources of news. People have a right to know the truth, and the British people have a right to know why their sons and daughters are fighting and being killed in a faraway land called Afghanistan. The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said: “The best jihad is the word of truth in front of a tyrant ruler.”

The narcotics industry is amongst the largest international businesses in the world. The U.N estimates approximately $400 billion a year is involved.⁶ Kofi Anan, the ex-secretary general of the United Nations, claimed that the illegal narcotics industry is greater than the global oil and gas industry and twice as large as the overall automobile industry.

This gives us an idea of the scale we are dealing with. We know that the oil and gas or global energy industry is one of the largest industries in the world. Oil is so central to the global economy that it is referred to as an ‘oil-based economy’.

It is clear that this is a huge, highly organised and integrated international industry. There must be very powerful players where such vast amounts of money are involved. This is not about a few Pakistanis smuggling Afghan heroin and selling it in Bradford. That is just the very lowest point of the chain.⁷ There are far bigger players involved, and they are literally making billions.

The 18th and 19th centuries were the height of the British Empire. In the 20th century, America emerges as the major world power and proceeds to sideline Britain, France and the old colonial powers.

Let us examine the ‘Opium Wars’, also called the ‘Anglo-Chinese Wars.’

The East India Company was owned by British aristocracy and major British traders. It was a shareholder company and the names of all of the owners can be easily looked up. The East India Company is described as the mother of modern corporations and, interestingly, it had its own army.

The Mughal Empire was in decline when, in 1757, the East India Company conquered Bengal. This was a major opium growing region. The East India Company pursued a monopoly on the production and export of opium.⁸ It was only later, towards the end of the 19th century, that heroin was first synthesized from opium. Prior to that, it was the opium that was smoked.

In 1773, 75 tonnes were exported to China. The East India Company was selling the opium to China in exchange for Chinese commodities such as silk and tea.

This was against Chinese law. The Chinese had outlawed opium in their land because of the detrimental effects on their people. However Britain continued. By the 1830’s, England had become the major drug trafficking organisation in the world, through the East India Company. Many opium addicts were coming about in China. The British government gave the East India Company a monopoly on trade with China.

Heroin Destroys Lives

Opium is a devastating addiction. When people become addicted to opium or heroin, they will give all of their wealth to feed their addiction. When they run out of money they will start stealing, from their own family, from their neighbours. Many women will go into prostitution to pay for their habit. It’s a very, very addictive drug.

As a side note, many people of my generation did not get into hard drugs like heroin because of the public awareness campaigns that took place in the 1980’s when we were going through school. Many of my generation will remember the ‘Just Say No’ campaign that began in America and crossed over to the UK in the 1980s. The fact that we still remember it shows, firstly, how powerful the visual media is in our lives, and, secondly, how easily it can be used as a force for good if the will is there. It makes you wonder why such campaigns are not seen any longer and why steps are not taken to prevent the glamorisation of drug use in the media.

From a purely business point of view, this is the best commodity you can imagine. You sell this to someone and they will come back for more.

Many heroin addicts soon start injecting the drug so that it goes straight into the bloodstream. This often causes infections and abscesses.

When they keep injecting into the same veins, they clot up so they have to keep finding new ones. Many end up injecting into their groin or even the base of the tongue.

The Opium Trade in the Nineteenth Century

Moving now into the 19th century, the opium trade was increasing. By the 1820’s it had gone up to 900 tonnes of opium annually from India to China. Once again the Imperial Chinese government made the opium imports illegal, but Great Britain continued. By 1837, 2500 tonnes were being exported. This was more than all other British exports to China combined.

In effect, the opium trade was fuelling the East India company, and — considering that India was the richest and most productive region of the empire — was a major driver for the empire itself.

The First Opium War came about because the Chinese were resisting the import of opium into their country. Great Britain sent warships to face the Chinese. It has been described as “perhaps the most sordid, base and vicious event in European history.” The Chinese were defeated and were forced to sign a treaty in 1842. They were forced to pay 6 million dollars for the opium that the Chinese police had destroyed. Hong Kong was handed over to Britain, and access to Chinese ports was agreed.

Over the next 30 years the opium trade more than doubled.

France was Britain’s main colonial rival.

In 1856, because of the devastating effect on the Chinese people, the Chinese once again made attempts to resist. The Second Opium War broke out and Britain was again victorious. This time Great Britain demanded complete legalisation of opium and the free propagation of Christianity in China, to which the Chinese had no choice but to submit.

In 1858, the East India Company was dissolved and the British government itself took on the governance of India. Incidentally, John Stewart Mill, one of the fathers of modern capitalism, made a ‘valiant defence’ of the East India Company.

Following the second opium war, China gave up trying to stop the influx of opium and, to minimise the economic impact of the British trade, decided to grow opium itself,. By the end of the 19th century, 90 million out of 300 million Chinese were addicted to opium. Almost a third of the population were addicts.

The Opium Trade in the Twentieth Century

Let us move on to the 20th century which has been triumphantly described as “the American Century”. It seems strange for anyone to want to claim the 20th century, as it was, no doubt, the most bloody, horrific century known to recorded history, which witnessed two world wars and the slaughter of millions. One of the signs of the End Times according to the Prophet (may blessings and peace be upon him) is widespread bloodshed.

As Shaykh Hamza Yusuf⁹ has mentioned, the 20th century, especially the first half of it, can be seen in the light of the power struggle between the new American power and colonial rivals Britain and France, with the US emerging victorious. Many of the events of the 20th century can be looked at in that light.

Looking at America, let us examine actions rather than words.

As Noam Chomsky points out, “Britain can appeal to an imperial tradition of refreshing candor, unlike the United States which has preferred to don the garb of saintliness as it proceeds to crush anyone in its path.” In other words, the British were openly racist and imperial in their outlook. With the United States, we find a different approach. They always claim to be doing ‘good’ while, in fact, crushing anyone in their path to power and dominance.

If we concentrate on rhetoric and the public stances of politicians, we will simply be lost in circles of half-truths, avoidance, and illogicity. If we examine actions, we may arrive at a clearer understanding of reality.

Coming into the 20th century, China eventually managed to stop Britain exporting opium to it. Significantly, it only achieved this with the assistance of the USA. China had tried in vain for 150 years and fought two wars to stop Britain bringing opium into China, but it had failed.

In 1911, US president Theodore Roosevelt intervened to break up the British opium trade. This was, no doubt, a significant blow for Britain’s imperial economy. Of course, the American stance was that they were doing it for a good cause.

Through the forum of the Shanghai International Opium Conference, the US pressed for legislation aimed at suppressing the sale of opium to China. Britain and France had to agree.

By 1917 China had stopped producing and importing opium. In the 1950s, all opium production in China ceased with the communist regime. Before the Second World War, it was producing most of the world’s opium.

Opium production shifted away from China to neighbouring countries which became known as the golden triangle: Thailand, Laos, Burma, all bordering China on the south-west side. In the 1970s, 67 % of the world’s opium was coming from this area. In 1972, one third of US soldiers coming back from Vietnam were addicted to opium.

Wherever the United States intervenes, politically or militarily, in different opium producing regions, opium production invariably increases. The US, of course, will blame one factor or another for this, and often claims to be struggling valiantly to fight the drug problem. Once again, witness ‘the garb of saintliness’ that Chomsky describes.

For example, in the 1970s, Nixon launched his ‘war on drugs.’ He successfully shut down the heroin supply chain through Turkey and France (the so-called ‘French connection’), but “inadvertently” ended up creating a new market for the South-East Asian heroin. The long term consequence of this drug war was in fact increased global opium production and rising heroin consumption.¹⁰

In a well-referenced article by Peter Dale Scott, professor at the University of California, Berkley, under the sub-title, ‘Expanded World Drug Production as a Product of US Interventions,’ he shows that every time America becomes politically or militarily involved in any drug producing country, drug production multiplies.¹¹ Here are some examples he gives for opium production:

Burma: 40 tonnes in 1939 – 600 tonnes in 1970
Thailand: 7 tonnes in 1939 – 200 tonnes in 1968
Laos: Less than 15 tonnes in 1939 – 50 tonnes in 1973

In Columbia, US troops have been intervening since the late 1980s in another so-called ‘war on drugs,’ but in fact the coca production (which is what cocaine is produced from) has tripled between 1991 and 1999. Cultivation of the opium poppy has increased by five times in the region.

Once again, either you can look at realities on the ground or you can listen to the rhetoric. There are many reasons why they have been unable to curtail drug production, for example, “We were unable to control the situation here,” or “the insurgents are causing trouble so we are unable to control the drug trade,” etc.

However, with a repeated pattern, excuses start becoming a little lame, to use a colloquial expression. This is a huge cake, and people want part of the cake. The CIA has been widely implicated in the international drugs trade.¹² ,¹³ ,¹⁴

Afghanistan became important as it began producing a lot of opium. After the defeat of the communists in 1989, Afghanistan descended into chaos with multiple warlords, each commanding his own territory and establishing the rule of brute force.

The opium trade flourished. By the 1990s, half of the world’s heroin and 90% of European heroin was coming from Afghanistan. In 1996, the Taliban took power in Kabul. Initially the Taliban allowed the opium production to continue. Although opium is illegal in Shariah law, they justified their position by saying that stopping the opium trade would have a devastating impact on Afghanistan’s impoverished economy, and, secondly, that Afghan opium was being exported to non-Muslim lands, so it was not the Taliban’s concern.

Insight into the players involved in the international drug trade

In 1986, Major Zahooruddin Afridi of the Pakistan Army was caught driving to Karachi from Peshawar with 220 kilograms of high grade heroin. This was the largest seizure in Pakistani history. Two months later, Air Force officer, Flight Lieutenant Khalilur Rahman was caught with 220 kilograms of heroin on the same route. He calmly confessed that this was his fifth mission. The total value of just these two seizures was $600 million, equivalent to the entire US aid to Pakistan that year.¹⁵

This brings home the vast sums of money involved. If this is the value of just two seizures, it is perhaps not surprising, bearing in mind human nature, that top government officials and army personnel are involved. Both men were put in jail in Karachi but soon mysteriously disappeared.

Ahmed Rashid mentions that “western anti-narcotics agencies in Islamabad kept track of drug lords, who became Members of the National Assembly… Drug lords funded candidates to high office in both Bhutto’s PPP and Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League.”¹⁵ This is what money can do.

At the end of 2000, Mullah Omar, no doubt under pressure from other ulema, reversed the Taliban position and issued the fatwa to ban the opium poppy, despite the economic repercussions on his country.

The United Nations confirmed that by spring, which is the time of year for the opium harvest, opium production had gone down to almost zero.

Half of the world’s heroin had been stopped by that one act of Mullah Omar. Martin Jelsma, in the International Journal on Drug Policy, states, “The Taliban opium ban in 2000/2001 had, there is no doubt, the most profound impact on opium/heroin supply in modern history.”¹⁶

You can imagine that some very powerful people were not too happy about this.

Soon after this, the September 11 attacks took place in New York, leading, within months, to the invasion of Afghanistan. America and Britain brought back all of the old drug lords, the so called Northern Alliance. Opium production went straight back up to what it had been before the ban by the Taliban.

It is by no means clear who engineered the September 11 attacks. Iraq had nothing to do with September 11, but it was invaded as a direct result. September 11 led to America gaining direct control of Iraq, with its huge oil reserves, and Afghanistan, with its huge opium crop. American forces were extremely efficient in immediately seizing and securing the Iraqi oil fields, but are not organised enough to this day to provide basic amenities for the Iraqi people, or stop the opium/heroin production in Afghanistan.

An important point about the poppy growth in Afghanistan is that it is relatively simple for the US to eradicate it. All of it is well mapped out by satellite imagery. By satellite, you can read what is written on a cigarette packet so it is no problem identifying the massive opium fields. Sophisticated computer programs can map out exactly where the opium is growing.¹⁷ The US forces could destroy the crops using aerial spraying techniques. They do not even have to go on the ground, they can simply fly over, spray and destroy. This is not denied by the US and its allies, but other reasons are given to justify why opium poppies are not destroyed.

A recent development is that the media has started to portray the Taliban as the cause of the current explosion in heroin and opium production.

In 2002, following the American-led invasion, the United Nations drug agency issued an urgent warning that the allied forces need to act quickly to destroy the poppy crops before the end of spring. Otherwise the heroin that the Taliban had stopped would flood back. However, the Bush Administration-CIA decided not to destroy the poppy crop in Afghanistan, saying, “We decided not to destroy Afghanistan’s opium over fears that such an act may destabilise Pakistan.”¹⁸

Just $200 given to each Afghan poppy farmer would compensate for their opium crop. For just $20 million in total, America could get the farmers to stop growing opium by simply paying them off.

A significant point to note in this regard is the ease and rapidity with which the Taliban were able to eradicate opium production In Afghanistan, despite having none of the sophisticated technology or resources available to western agencies. The results of the Taliban opium ban shocked the world anti-narcotics agencies, including the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which have been operating for decades on a budget of billions to fight against the global illegal drugs trade. The only sensible conclusion we can draw from this is that there are powerful forces working to prevent easy and effective strategies from being implemented by anti-narcotics agencies. In view of the effectiveness of the Taliban opium ban, claims by anti-narcotics agencies that they have been unable to find effective means of fighting the ‘war on drugs’ despite the immense resources thrown at them by the US and other governments are implausible. Rashid mentions that several members of the US Drugs Enforcement Administration in Pakistan in the 1980s resigned from their posts or requested to be relocated as the CIA refused to allow them to do their job.¹⁹

In 2009, opium production has continued to escalate dramatically. Recent figures from the UN show that 90% of the world’s heroin now comes from Afghanistan.

History of the Taliban

It was 1989 that the Soviet troops finally left Afghanistan. America and Pakistan had been helping the so-called Mujahidin fight against the communists. The puppet communist government left behind by the Russians was overthrown by 1992.

Following that, Afghanistan descended into an anarchic state, and it was in 1994 that the Taliban emerged. Ahmad Rashid says, “Afghanistan was in a state of virtual disintegration just before the Taliban emerged… The country was divided into warlord fiefdoms… The warlords seized homes and farms and abused the population at will.”¹⁹ They were kidnapping boys and girls for sexual pleasure and robbing merchants in the markets.

Traditional the ulema mention that an hour of anarchy is worse than 40 years of a tyrant. You may have a tyrant ruler but he maintains law and order. People can go about their normal life. But when you have anarchy, a complete breakdown of authority, the poor and the weak in society are the ones who suffer most.

Ahmad Rashid is an Afghan himself. He met several of the original Taliban, friends of Mullah Omar. They told him that during the time after the communists were defeated, some of the mujahidin, like Mullah Omar, went back to their madrasas (schools) to continue studying and teaching. All of the anti-communist fighters were referred to as mujahidin but some were doing it for the sake of God, some evidently were not.

Mullah Omar himself had a school where he was teaching students in the south of Afghanistan. His companions mention that they used to sit and discuss what they could do about the state of the country. They agonised over the abuses taking place and the suffering of the people.

In the spring of 1994, the initial event that took place is quite widely reported and probably true. Two teenage girls were abducted by one of the commanders, taken to a military camp, their hair shaved, and they were repeatedly raped. Some of their family came to Mullah Omar and asked for his help. Mullah Omar took thirty students with sixteen rifles between them. They freed the girls and hung the commander from the barrel of a tank. Mullah Omar said later, “We were fighting against Muslims who had gone wrong. How could we remain quiet when we could see crimes being committed against women and the poor.”

Word got around of this incident. People started coming to Mullah Omar and asking for his help. A few months later, two commanders were fighting over a young boy that both wanted to rape. Several civilians were killed in that fight. Omar and the students freed him. This led, as Rashid describes it, to Mullah Omar emerging as a ‘Robin Hood figure,’ helping the poor against the warlords and druglords. From this beginning, the Taliban (or ‘Students’) eventually took control of Kandahar and then the south of Afghanistan. Within two years, they had marched into the capital, Kabul.

Mullah Omar Declared ‘Commander of the Believers’

In Kandahar, there is a museum which contains a burdah (a cloak) which is attributed to the Prophet himself, and is considered the most holy shrine in Afghanistan. The cloak is rarely taken out of the museum. For Mullah Omar, it was brought it out for the first time in 60 years. Draped in the blessed cloak, the ‘students’ pledged allegiance to him and declared him ‘Ameer al Mu’mineen’ (Commander of the Believers).

Strict Interpretation of Islam

The Taliban were criticised for was their strict interpretation of Islam. This aspect is routinely used as a justification for invading the country. Journalist, Michael Griffin mentions the following acts of the Taliban when they took Kabul:

They made an announcement on the radio ordering: “All those sisters working in government offices are hereby informed to stay at home until further notice”. They were probably concerned about unislamic free-mixing in government departments. This paralysed the government, of which 25% staff were women.

They made the full body covering (Niqaab) obligatory for women. Men had to wear shalwar kameez apparently, not western clothing, grow long beards and forced to go to the mosque five times a day. They prohibited toothpaste, insisting on the natural tooth-cleansing root, miswak. All of the following were forbidden: TV, kite flying, pigeons, dancing, music, singing, chess, marbles, cigarettes, and using paper as a wrapper in case it was printed with extracts of the Quran.

I don’t know what really happened. How many times have you seen Taliban ambassadors or representatives on television, explaining their point of view? You have to give people a chance to speak; this is a fundamental aspect of justice. One of the most effective techniques of media control is simply not to give the ‘enemy’ a voice.

One of the rare exceptions was when Taliban Envoy, Saeed Rahmatullah Hishami, was interviewed on the American radio station, Talk of the Nation, prior to the September 11 attacks.

He protested at the biased reporting and demonisation of the Taliban by western media: “If I had all my knowledge of Taliban from the media here, I would hate the Taliban as well.”

He was asked why the Taliban stopped girls going to school. He repeatedly said, “The Taliban have never said that girls should not go to school.” In fact, he stated that the Taliban had appealed to the international community to help Afghanistan provide facilities for girls to obtain a segregated education. The United Nations had responded by building several girls’ colleges there which had been running successfully under the Taliban. He also stated that contrary to the media depiction of the Taliban as misogynous zealots who did not allow women to leave their houses, the Taliban had respect for women and had improved the situation for Afghan women, making it safe for them to walk the streets. He said that women were working in several government ministries under Taliban rule.

He also claimed that the Taliban had offered the US to try Bin Laden in Afghanistan if the US provided evidence that he was involved in attacks on civilians in Tanzania and Kenya. Anyone convicted of killing civilians under Taliban rule would get capital punishment. The US rejected this offer. The Taliban made a further offer agreeing to an international monitoring committee to be present in Afghanistan to watch Bin Laden’s activities for the rest of his life, to ensure that he was not politically active. This was also rejected by the US.

Saeed Hishami emphasised that the Taliban had done what no one else had done for Afghanistan: bring law and order, disarm the people, establish peace and security, make it safe for women to walk the streets, and stop opium production, but, he lamented, “the world has only sent us cruise missiles, sanctions, isolation and criticism.”

From the limited information I have, I suspect the Taliban did have a strict interpretation of Islam. But one thing you can see from the list of prohibitions is that it is according to the traditional Hanafi school of law. If you read the later books of Hanafi jurisprudence, you will find that the Taliban rulings pretty much follow them to the letter. Was there wisdom in enforcing such a strict set of rules suddenly upon the people? That is debatable, but really the whole discussion about the Taliban’s interpretation of shariah obscures and deviates attention from the real issues at hand

Muslims are becoming a persecuted minority in the UK, sometimes living in an atmosphere of fear if they wish to speak the truth. One of the things we appreciate in this country is freedom of speech. There is an increasing tendency to see things in the ‘you’re either with us or with the terrorists’ fashion of George W Bush.

I do not support terrorism or attacks on innocent civilians in this country or any other, but does this mean I have to support an unjust foreign policy of the UK government? Do Muslims not have a right to express dissent without being labelled a ‘fifth column’ or ‘traitors in our midst’?

America’s War Against the Taliban

When the Taliban came into power, perhaps they had a strict interpretation of Islam, but they brought law and order to the country, and it was a widely popular movement, because the poor and the oppressed, who were suffering from the anarchy, drug lords, and warlords, welcomed them. The poor and weak were the ones who benefited because the Taliban brought justice and security. They brought strict punishments, but for people who wanted to be law abiding citizens, go out and work, earn their daily living and feel safe on the streets, they were heroes and saviours. They are aggressively demonised in the global media. It is difficult to see the reality through the propaganda, and they are certainly not a media-savvy group.²⁰

In 1996, the Taliban came into power in Kabul. In the beginning they were welcomed by the Pakistan and US administrations. People do not know this but there were Taliban ambassadors in America trying to work out a deal for a gas pipeline through Afghanistan. An American oil company and an Argentinean one were competing for this contract. So the US was dealing with the Taliban. At that time the Taliban were allowing the opium production to continue.

Pakistan was particularly pleased because the Taliban had made the roads safe, and Pakistani trade could transit through Afghanistan to Turkmenistan and other central Asian destinations. A few feminist voices objected to alleged abuse of women’s rights, but Pakistan recognised the Taliban government, as did Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

But in early 2001, they stopped the opium.

After September 11 2001, the USA delivered the following ultimatum to the Taliban: The Taliban should hand over all the leaders of al Qaeda, release all imprisoned foreign nationals, close immediately every terrorist training camp, and give the United States access to terrorist training camps for inspection.

The Taliban responded that if the US gave them evidence that Bin Laden was guilty, they would hand him over. They said that they had no evidence in their possession linking him to the September 11 attacks. The response was not unreasonable: give us evidence and we will hand him over.

On 4th October, it is believed that the Taliban offered to turn Bin Laden over to Pakistan to have a trial in an international tribunal according to Islamic Shariah. Pakistan refused. On 7th October, the military threat was building up, and the Taliban offered again to detain Bin Laden and try him under Islamic Law, if the United States made a formal request and presented evidence. This was also immediately rejected by the US.

When the American-led forces attacked Afghanistan, Pakistan entered into full cooperation with the American forces, allowing them to use her land and airspace. Faced with the full might of Washington and her allies, Pervez Musharraf committed one of the most treacherous acts in Islam’s history. Fellow Muslim neighbours and brothers whom Pakistan had supported were ignominiously forsaken to gain American favour.

If Pakistan had simply remained neutral, it would have saved some honour. Even Russia refused its airspace to be used by America until only a few weeks ago, when Barack Obama finally persuaded Putin and colleagues to allow it.

I was in Syria when Iraq was invaded. I attended Friday prayer at the mosque of Shaykh Said Ramadan al-Buti. In the sermon, he said, “Not one leader of the Arab countries has stood up. Not one voice has been heard from any Arab leader against the invasion of Iraq.” Baghdad has been bombed and Iraq has been invaded and not a voice heard from her Arab neighbours. Shaykh Buti said that it would have been better for us to die, for all of us to have been killed [referring to the Arab people], then to suffer such a humiliation and disgrace.

Whereas Musharraf capitulated, Mullah Omar remained steadfast. The Taliban were clearly desperate not to enter a conflict with America and her allies. They made offer after offer to the United States to try and resolve the issue, but they were not willing to hand over a man against whom they were given no evidence.

The Voice of America radio station conducted an interview with Mullah Omar through satellite phone just before the commencement of the war. The US National Security Council raised objections and it was never broadcast in America. However it was published in full in the UK in the Guardian newspaper — not front page news though. Most people probably missed it. This is a transcript of the interview:

VoA: Why don’t you expel Osama Bin Laden?

Mullah Omar: This is not an issue of Osama Bin Laden, it is an issue of Islam. Islam’s prestige is at stake. So is Afghanistan’s tradition.

VoA: Do you know the US has announced a war on terrorism?

Mullah Omar: I am considering two promises. One is the promise of God, the other is that of Bush. The Promise of God is that ‘My land is vast.’ If you start a journey on God’s Path, you can reside anywhere on this Earth and will be protected. The promise of Bush is that there is no place on Earth where you can hide and I cannot find you. We will see which one of these two promises is fulfilled.

VoA: But aren’t you afraid for the people, yourself, the Taliban, your country?

Mullah Omar: Almighty God is helping the believers and the Muslims. God Says He will never be satisfied with the infidels. In terms of worldly affairs America is very strong. Even if it was twice as strong, or twice that, it could not be strong enough to defeat us. We are confident that no one can harm us if God is with us.

VoA: You are telling me you are not concerned but Afghans all over the world are concerned.

Mullah Omar: We are also concerned. Great issues lie ahead but we depend on God’s Mercy. Consider our point of view. If we give Osama away today, Muslims who are now pleading to give him up would then be reviling us for giving him up. Everyone is afraid of America and wants to please it, but Americans will not be able to prevent such acts like the one that has just occurred because America has taken Islam hostage. If you look at Islamic countries the people are in despair, they are complaining that Islam is gone but people remain firm in their Islamic beliefs. In their pain and frustration some of them commit suicide acts. They feel they have nothing to lose.

VoA: What do you mean by saying America has taken the Islamic world hostage?

Mullah Omar: America controls the governments of the Islamic countries. The people ask to follow Islam but the governments do not listen because they are in the grip of the United States. If someone follows the path of Islam, the government arrests him, tortures him or kills him. This is the doing of America. If it stops supporting those governments and lets the people deal with them then such things won’t happen. America has created the evil that is attacking it. The evil will not disappear even if I die and Osama dies and others die. The US should step back and review its policy. It should stop trying to impose its empire on the rest of the world, especially on Islamic countries.

VoA: So you won’t give Osama Bin Laden up?

Mullah Omar: No. We cannot do that. If we did it means we are not Muslims, that Islam is finished. If we were afraid of attack, we could have surrendered him the last time we were threatened and attacked. So America can hit us again and this time we don’t even have a friend.

VoA: If you fight America with all your might, can the Taliban do that? Won’t America beat you and won’t your people suffer even more?

Mullah Omar: I am very confident that it won’t turn out this way. Please note this. There is nothing more we can do except depend on Almighty God. If a person does then he is assured that the Almighty will help him, have mercy on him, and he will succeed.²¹

Afghanistan Post-Invasion

By 2006, a few years after the invasion, the Washington Post reported that opium production in Afghanistan, now providing more than 90% of the world’s heroin, broke all previous records.²²

The United Nations office of drugs and crime in 2006 reported that the harvest in Afghanistan was going to be a world record, and up to 92% of the world’s heroin was now originating in Afghanistan.

The Daily Mail on 21 July 2007 carried an article by Craig Murray, British ambassador in neighbouring Uzbekistan from 2002 to 2004, entitled: “Britain is protecting the biggest heroin crop of all time”. He asks why British troops are being killed in Afghanistan. He says, “The Taliban had reduced the opium crop to precisely nil. That is an inconvenient truth that our spin has managed to obscure…”

“They were as unlikely to sell you heroin as a bottle of Johnny Walker” (alluding to the fact that they are strict Muslims). “They stamped out the opium trade and impoverished and drove out the drug warlords, whose warring and rapacity had ruined what was left of the country after the Soviet war.”

Murray says that since the invasion, Afghanistan has progressed from simple opium production to actually manufacturing heroin. Now, “opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with Nato troops.”
He goes on to say in the article: “The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government. This is the government that our soldiers are fighting and dying to protect”.

Murray is vehemently anti-Taliban but he is willing to speak the truth, and his concern is that British soldiers are dying in an unjust war.²³ This is very relevant because recently there has been a new upsurge in fighting and the propaganda machine has been working in overdrive to provide fresh justifications for continued British involvement in Afghanistan.

Hamid Karzai is reported to have acted as a consultant for US oil company, UNOCAL, and is an ex-CIA operative. Following the invasion, he was made president of Afghanistan. George Bush was not a very subtle player.

Karzai’s brother has been linked to the heroin trade. The New York Times on October 4 2008 reported that an enormous cache of heroin was found under some concrete blocks. Karzai’s brother phoned the commander who had seized the heroin and instructed him to release the vehicle and the drugs. Two years later a similar incident took place. Once again his brother was involved.²⁴

In fact the article goes on to state that it is widely known that Karzai’s brother is heavily involved in the international heroin trade. It mentions that the White House ‘favoured a hands off approach’ toward Karzai’s brother. (This means they will not get involved). The White House justified its position by alluding to “the political delicacy of the matter”.

Current Situation in Afghanistan

As the British death toll escalates, the propaganda machine has gone into overdrive to keep the British public on board. According to the media, the Taliban are responsible for all of Afghanistan’s problems including the opium/heroin production. The Taliban are the enemies of the Afghan people and it has fallen to the valiant efforts of the allied forces to save them from them. If you look carefully, however, the facts do surface from time to time. On December 2 2006, the Washington Post admitted that the Taliban were not to blame for the record levels of opium: “…most experts believe it is largely an organized criminal enterprise. According to a major report on the Afghan drug industry jointly released last week by the World Bank and the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, key narcotics traffickers “work closely with sponsors in top government and political positions.”,,,”²⁵

Barack Obama came into power with a lot of enthusiasm, even from sections of the Muslim world. The first major step he took, after visiting London to tackle the economic crisis, was to gather European leaders together in Paris to initiate a new offensive against the Taliban. As a direct result, two million people so far have been made homeless in the northwest frontier region.²⁶

Let’s keep an eye on what he does, not what he says.

1. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman have done some of the pioneering work on the subversive role of mass media in western societies. For example, see the classic work: Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. See also: Chomsky, Media Control, The spectacular achievements of propaganda [Seven Stories Press]
2. NASR, Islam and the Plight of Modern Man, [ITS], p. 207.
3. Douglas Harbrecht, “Another Clouded Clinton Appointee,” Business Week, 8 Nov 1993.
4. Bernard Haykel: “Radical Salafism,” Hindu Times, 1 Dec 2001.
5. Amy Gershkoff and Shana Kusher (2005). Shaping Public Opinion: The 9/11-Iraq Connection in the Bush Administration’s Rhetoric. Perspectives on Politics, 3 , p. 525-537.
6. Calvani, S., “Eastern Horizons,” UN International Drug Control Programme, #1, March 3, 2000.
7. Kopp, Political Economy of illegal drugs, p. 23, “…we know almost nothing of the functioning of the segments of the chain that enable the drugs to move from the wholesalers to the final resellers…”
8. Many books have been written on the British Government-East India Company involvement in the opium trade, for example: Trocki, Carl A., Opium, empire and the global political economy [Routledge]
9. Director, Zaytuna Institute, California, and one of the leading traditionalist Islamic scholars in the West.
10. Detailed statistics on global drug production and use can be found in the annual ‘World Drugs Report’ of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
11. Scott, P., “Afghanistan: Heroin-ravaged State”, Global Research, 8 May 2009.
12. Rashid, A. Taliban: Islam, oil and the new great game in central Asia, [Pub: I B Tauris], p. 121: “The heroin pipeline in the 1980s could not have operated without the knowledge, if not the connivance, of officials at the highest level of the army, the government and the CIA.”
13. McCoy, A., The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade [Lawrence Hill Books]. McCoy discusses in detail how U.S. drug policies and actions in the Third World has created “America’s heroin plague.” McCoy notes that every attempt at interdiction has only resulted in the expansion of both the production and consumption of drugs.
14. Haq, I., ‘Pak-Afghan drug trade in historical perspective,’ Asian Survey, Vol. 36, No. 10 (Oct. 1996), p. 945-963: “During…the Cold War…CIA intervention provided the political protection and logistics linkage that joined Afghanistan’s poppy fields, through Pakistan’s land mass to heroin markets in Europe and America,” p. 945.
15. Rashid, p. 120-121.
16. Jelsma, M., ‘Learning lessons from the Taliban opium ban,‘ International Journal of Drug Policy, Vol. 16, Issue 2, March 2005, p. 98-103.
17. Deyoung, K., “Afghanistan Opium Crop Sets Record,” Washington Post, 2 Dec 2006.
18. Smith, C., “Bush Will Not Stop Afghan Opium Trade,” Newsmax, 28 March 2002.
19. Rashid, p. 121.
20. Chris Sands, “Afghans back Taliban, says abducted senator,” The National, 2 Oct 2008.
21. ”Mullah Omar — in his own words,” The Guardian, 26 September 2001.
22. Deyoung, K., “Afghanistan Opium Crop Sets Record”, Washington Post, 2 Dec 2006.
23. Murray, ‘Britain is protecting the biggest heroin crop of all time,è Daily Mail, 21 July 2007.
24. Risen, J., “Reports Link Karzai’s Brother to Afghanistan Heroin Trade,” New York Times, Oct 4 2008.
25. Deyoung, K., “Afghanistan Opium Crop Sets Record,” Washington Post, 2 Dec 2006.
26. Walsh, D., “Swat valley could be worst refugee crisis since Rwanda, UN warns,” The Guardian, 19 May 2009, p. 16.

This fall, I began my first lecture on Eurocentrism by asking my students, How Eurocentric is your day? I explained what I wanted to hear from them. Can they get through a typical day without running into ideas, institutions, values, technologies and products that originated outside the West – in China, India, the Islamicate or Africa?

The question befuddled my students. I proceeded to pepper them with questions about the things they do during a typical day, from the time they wake up.

Unbeknownst, my students discover that they wake up in ‘pajamas,’ trousers of Indian origin with an Urdu-Persian name. Out of bed, they shower with soap and shampoo, whose origins go back to the Middle East and India. Their tooth brush with bristles was invented in China in the fifteenth century. At some point after waking up, my students use toilet paper and tissue, also Chinese inventions of great antiquity.

Do the lives of my students rise to Eurocentric purity once they step out of the toilet and enter into the more serious business of going about their lives? Not quite.

I walk my student through her breakfast. Most likely, this consists of cereals, coffee and orange juice, with sugar added to the bargain. None originated in Europe. Cereals were first cultivated in the Fertile Crescent some ten thousand years BCE. Coffee, orange and sugar still carry – in their etymology – telltale signs of their origins, going back to the Arabs, Ethiopians and Indians. Try to imagine your life without these stimulants and sources of calories.

How far could my students go without the alphabet, numbers and paper? Yet, the alphabet came to Europe courtesy of the ancient Phoenicians. As their name suggests, the Arabic numerals were brought to Europe by the Arabs, who, in turn, had obtained it from the Indians. Paper came from China, also brought to Europe by the Muslims.

Obstinately, my students’ day refuses to get off to a dignified Eurocentric start.

In her prayer, my Christian student turns to a God who – in his human form – walked the earth in Palestine and spoke Aramaic, a close cousin of Arabic. When her thoughts turn to afterlife, my student thinks of the Day of Judgment, paradise and hell, concepts borrowed from the ancient Egyptians and Persians. ‘Paradise’ entered into English, via Greek, from the ancient Avestan pairidaeza.

Of medieval origin, the college was inspired and, most likely, modeled after the madrasa or Islamic college, first set up by a Seljuk vizier in eleventh century Baghdad. In a nod to this connection, professors at universities still hold a ‘chair,’ a practice that goes back to the madrasa, where the teacher alone sat in a chair while his students sat around him on rugs.

When she finishes college and prepares to receive her baccalaureate at the graduation ceremony, our student might do well to acknowledge another forgotten connection to the madrasa. This diploma harks back to the ijaza – Arabic for license – given to students who graduated from madrasas in the Islamicate.

Our student runs into fields of study – algebra, trigonometry, astronomy, chemistry, medicine and philosophy – that were introduced, via Latin, to Western Europe from the Islamicate. She also encounters a variety of scientific terms – algorithm, alkali, borax, amalgam, alembic, amber, calibrate, azimuth and nadir – which have Arabic roots.

If my students play chess over the weekend and threaten the King with ‘check mate,’ that phrase is adapted from Farsi – Shah maat – for ‘the King is helpless, defeated.’

When she uses coins, paper currency or writes a check, she is using forms of money first used outside Europe. Gold bars were first used as coins in Egypt in the fourth millennium BCE. With astonishment, Marco Polo records the use of paper currency in China, and describes how the paper used as currency was made from the bark of mulberry trees.

At college, my student will learn about modernity, ostensibly the source and foundation of the power and the riches of Western nations. Her professors in sociology will claim that laws based on reasoning, the abolition of priesthood, the scientific method, and secularism – hallmarks of modernity – are entirely of Western origin. Are they?

During the eighteenth century, many of the leading Enlightenment thinkers were keenly aware that Chinese had preceded them in their emphasis on reasoning by some two millennia. By the end of this century, however, a more muscular, more confident Europe chose to erase their debt to China from its collective memory.

Similarly, Islam, in the seventh century, made a more radical break from priesthood than the Reformation in Europe. In the eleventh century, an Arab scientist, Alhazen – his Latinized name – devised numerous experiments to test his theories in optics, but, more importantly, theorized cogently about the scientific method in his writings. Roger Bacon, the putative ‘founder’ of the scientific method, had read Alhazen in a Latin translation.

When our student reads the sonnets of Shakespeare and Spenser, she is little aware that the tradition of courtly love they celebrate comes via Provencal and the troubadours (derived from taraba, Arabic for ‘to sing’) from Arab traditions of love, music and poetry. When our male student gets down on one knee while proposing to his fair lady, he might do well to remember this.

On a clear night, with a telescope on her dormitory rooftop, our student can watch stars, many of which still carry Arabic names. This might be a fitting closure to a day in the life of our student, who, more likely than not, remains Eurocentric in her understanding of world history, little aware of the multifarious bonds that connect her life to different parts of the ‘Orient.’

Katsoulis has recently published a book about the history of literary hoaxes. She is interested in particular in a unique fictional genre; namely ‘the Holocaust hoaxers’.

On the one hand, she confesses that “special privilege must be given to those increasingly few witness-writers who survived the Second World War in Europe.” She is even willing to accept Elie Wiesel’s peculiar take on ‘truth and fiction’, that “some stories are true that never happened.”

On the other hand she says, “those memoirists who think that they can pretend they were there when they weren’t ought to remember that hijacking the experiences of others for selfish ends will only end in ignominy.”

Katsoulis suggests that perhaps what “readers seek in trauma stories is akin to what people look for in pornography: something edgy they have never seen before, followed by a spectacular resolution”. Very much like the case of pornography, the dedicated audience of Jewish pain “want to identify (safely) with what they are reading; to try on someone else’s crisis for a while and see how it compares to their own.”

Katsoulis’ reference to ‘pornography’ is indeed interesting bearing in mind that, at the time of the Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem (1960’s), a new genre of S&M pornography namely Stalagemerged in Israel. It was a short-lived, highly sexualised fictional magazine that drew its imagery from Nazi exploitation of inmates in prisoner camps.

However, Katsoulis’ reference to ‘pornography’ may raise some questions. While pornography consumption can be realised as an attempt to seek libidinal pleasure through the imagery of others celebrating their symptoms, one may wonder, what kind of satisfaction anyone might seek from the repetition of a holocaust memory? Do we look for satisfaction? And if we do, what kind of satisfaction are we after exactly? What are the symptoms that are celebrated by the story tellers, and what are our symptoms consuming them?

Instead of a culture hooked on recycled images of degradation and suffering, I would actually expect a moral lesson to surface from the Shoa. I would hope for a genuine search for mercy and compassion. Evidently, this has never happened. Putting aside Israeli barbarism in Palestine, the West and the English speaking empire have never stopped igniting wars in the name of fake values driven by the Holocaust (democracy, liberalism, ‘universal’ human rights and so on).

Katsoulis stresses that the ‘hoaxers’ “had difficult childhoods but, feeling that their truth was shamefully small, they sought the grand signifier of the Holocaust to attract the compassion that they desired.” I urge you to read Katsoulis and if you have a spare moment, check out the comments that are no less revealing.

I myself saw recently saw two short videos that left me puzzled.

The first was an ABC News televised interview with Herman Rosenblat.

“The twinkly-eyed American pensioner who came forward with a story so magical that it lifted the heart of every cynic in New York,” was nothing but that of a compulsive liar. Once Rosenblat was confronted as a hoaxer he told the camera.

“It wasn’t a lie. It was my imagination. I believed my imagination, I believe my mind, I believe it now”

“But you know it wasn’t true” he is challenged by the ABC interviewer. “Yes”, he answers, “But in my imagination it was true”.

I guess that no one can argue with such an advanced post modernist argument.

In another video clip; Irene Weisberg Zisblatt, whose testimony is showcased in Steven Spielberg’s documentary film The Last Days, is caught lying to the camera at least twice.

I am not judging Zisblatt’s dishonesty or her tendency to exaggerate. It is more than likely that this woman went through hell on earth. But I do challenge Stephen Spielberg who, for some reason decided to exploit this woman in his Holywoodian attempt to archive and depict what he calls the ‘truth’ of the holocaust.

The question we are left with is why. Why does she lie? Why does he lie? Why does anyone lie? And if they lie and are entitled to believe in their figment of imagination, where can we learn about the truth? What can we learn about the truth? What is truth? Is there any truth? And if we can ever be lucky enough to find the truth or even just ‘a truth’, can we announce it without being at risk of social exclusion or even losing our freedom?

Katsoulis exposes a perverse tendency in the midst of our Western discourse. It is proved beyond doubt that our freedom to speak, and even to think, is under severe assault. I would take it one step further and argue that the Holocaust religion is the biggest current assault against humanity and humanism. First, it stops us from revisiting and revising our own living memory. Second, it stops us from drawing a universal ethical lesson from history and third, it leads to more and more genocidal crimes.

Instead of a revenge-driven doctrine, what we really want is grace and compassion.

Rather than a singular monolithic belief system promoting a deceptive notion of freedom centred on Jewish pain, what we really want is real pluralism and tolerance that would accept more than just one truth and encourage belief systems to respect each other.

In fact, the Jews, should have been the first to grasp it all. As Emmanuel Levinas suggested after WWII, Jews should have located themselves at the forefront of the battle against evil and racism. Despite there being a handful of Jewish ‘self haters’ who are committed to the exposure of the Zionist crime, this never happened. Not only did it not happen, the Jewish state is the ultimate example of a racist nationalist terrorist state.

Katsoulis is far from being a Holocaust denier. She believes that the Holocaust happened, yet she writes about the robbery of its memory. “When a writer stands before other survivors and gives as scripture what is stolen from the memories of real witnesses, they can expect little sympathy.” Katsoulis offers some criticism of the “unregulated Holocaust “industry”, where victimhood is rewarded by money and fame.”

However, I would like to extend Katsoulis’ quest. I would maintain that in fact we are the witnesses of an ongoing holocaust in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. We also witness Israel preparing itself to nuke Iran in the name of Jewish history and the Holocaust in particular. In front of our eyes we see the emergence of evil on a colossal magnitude, and we are somehow paralyzed by a historical chapter that, in comparison to contemporary Israeli crimes, has less and less significance or relevance.

Rather than being subject to an idolatry of an untouchable past, we better start to be concerned with the HERE and NOW, with the genocides that are committed in our names and under our nose by Israel and its supporters around the world.

I described him as well as I could and ended with the words: “He is as honest as a politician can be.”

Arafat broke into laughter, and all the others present, among them Mahmoud Abbas and Yasser Abed-Rabbo, joined in.

For the sake of proper disclosure: I always liked Rabin as a human being. I especially liked some traits of his.

First of all: his honesty. This is such a rare quality among politicians that it stood out like an oasis in the desert. His mouth and his heart were one, as far as is possible in political life. He did not lie when he could possibly avoid it.

He was a decent human being. Witness the “dollar affair”: when his term as Israeli ambassador in Washington DC came to an end, his wife Leah left behind a bank account, contrary to Israeli law at the time. When it was discovered, he protected his wife by assuming personal responsibility. At the time, unlike today, “assuming responsibility” was not an empty phrase. He left the Prime Minister’s office.

I liked even his most evident personality trait – his introversion. He was withdrawn, with few human contacts. Not a fellow-well-met back slapper, not one for lavishing compliments, indeed an anti-politician.

Also, I liked the way he told people straight to the face what he thought of them. Some of his expressions, in juicy Hebrew, have become part of Israeli folklore. Such as “indefatigable intriguer” (about Shimon Peres), “propellers” (about the settlers, meaning electric fans which spin noisily without going anywhere), “garbage of weaklings” (about people leaving Israel for good).

He had no small talk. In every conversation, he came to the point right at the start.

One might imagine that these characteristics would alienate people. Quite to the contrary, people were attracted to him because of them. In a world of pretentious, garrulous, mendacious, back-slapping politicians, he was a refreshing rarity.

More than anything else, I respected Rabin for his dramatic change of outlook at the age of 70. The man who had been a soldier since he was 18, who had fought Arabs all his life, suddenly became a peace-fighter. And not just a fighter for peace in general, but for peace with the Palestinian people, whose very existence had always been denied by the leaders of Israel.

The public memory, one of the most effective instruments of the establishment, is trying nowadays to obliterate this chapter. Throughout the country one can buy postcards showing Rabin shaking hands with King Hussein at the signing of the Israeli-Jordanian peace agreement, but it is almost impossible to find a card showing Rabin with Arafat at the Oslo agreement signing ceremony. Never happened.

As I have recounted before, I was an eye-witness to his inner revolution. From 1969 on, until after the Oslo agreement, we had a running debate about the Palestinian issue – at the Washington embassy, at parties where we met casually (generally at the bar), in the Prime Minister’s office and at his private home.

In one 1969 conversation, he objected strenuously to any dealings with the Palestinians. One sentence imprinted itself upon my mind: “I want an open border, not a secure border” (a play of words in Hebrew). At the time, his former commander, Yigal Alon, was spreading the slogan “secure borders”, in order to justify extensive annexations of occupied territory. Rabin wanted an open border between Israel and the West Bank, which he intended to give back to King Hussein. After this conversation, I wrote him that the border would be open only if there was a Palestinian state on the other side, because then the economic realities would compel both states – Israel and Palestine – to maintain close relations.

In 1975, after the start of my secret contacts with the PLO, I went to brief him (in accordance with the express wishes of the PLO). In the conversation that took place at the Prime Minister’s office, I tried to convince him to give up the “Jordanian option”, which I had always considered silly. He refused adamantly. “We must make peace with Hussein,” he told me. “After he has signed, I don’t care if the king is toppled.” Like Shimon Peres and many others, he entertained the illusion that the king would give up East Jerusalem.

I told him that I could not follow the logic of this line of thought. Let’s imagine that the king signed and was then overthrown. What next? The PLO would take over a state extending from Tulkarm to the approaches of Baghdad, in which four Arab armies could easily assemble. Was that, I asked, what he wanted?

In this conversation, too, one sentence imprinted itself on my mind: “I will not take the smallest step towards the Palestinians, because the first step would lead inevitably to the creation of a Palestinian state, and I don’t want that.” In the end he told me: “I oppose what you are doing, but I will not prevent you from meeting with them. If these meetings reveal things to you that you think the Israeli Prime Minister should know about, my door is open.” That was Rabin all over. The contacts, of course, broke the law.

After that I brought him several messages from Arafat, conveyed to me by the PLO representative in London, Sa’id Hamami. Arafat proposed small mutual gestures. Rabin refused all of them.

Consequently I was all the more impressed by Oslo. Later Rabin explained to me, one Shabbat at his private apartment, how he arrived there: King Hussein had resigned his responsibility for the West Bank. The “village leagues”, set up by Israel as pliant “representatives” of the Palestinians, were a dismal failure. As Minister of Defense he summoned local Palestinian leaders for individual consultations, and one after another they told him that their political address was in Tunis. After that, at the Madrid conference, Israel agreed to negotiate with a joint Jordanian-Palestinian delegation, but then the Jordanians told them that all Palestinian matters must be discussed with the Palestinian members alone. But at every meeting, the Palestinian delegates asked for a pause in order to call Tunis and get instructions from Arafat. Rabin’s conclusion: if all decisions are made by Arafat anyhow, why not talk with him directly?

It has always been said that Rabin had an “analytical mind”. He did not have much of an imagination, but he viewed facts soberly, analyzed them logically and drew his conclusions.

If so, why did the Oslo agreement fail?

The practical reasons are easy to see. From the beginning, the agreement was build on shaky foundations, because it lacked the main thing: a clear definition of the final objective of the process.

For Arafat it was self-evident that the agreed “interim stages” would lead to an independent Palestinian state in the whole of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with perhaps some minor exchanges of territory. East Jerusalem, including of course the Holy Shrines, was to become the capital of Palestine. The settlements would be dismantled. I am convinced that he would have been satisfied with a symbolic return of a limited number of refugees to Israel proper.

That was Arafat’s price for giving up 78% of the country, and no Palestinian leader, present or future, could be satisfied with less.

But Rabin’s aim was unclear, perhaps even to himself. At the time he was not yet ready to accept a Palestinian state. Absent an agreed destination, all the “interim phases” went awry. Every step caused new conflicts. (As I wrote at the time, when traveling from Paris to Berlin, one can stop at interim stations. When traveling from Paris to Madrid, one can also stop at interim stations – but they will be quite different ones.)

Arafat was conscious of the faults of the agreement. He told his people that it was “the best possible agreement in the worst possible circumstances”. But he believed that the dynamics of the peace process would overcome the obstacles on the way. So did I. We were both wrong.

After the signing, Rabin began to hesitate. Instead of rushing forwards to create facts, he dithered. This gave the opposing forces in Israel time to recoup from the shock, regroup and start a counterattack, which ended in his assassination.

Perhaps this mistake could have been foreseen. Rabin was by nature a cautious person. He was conscious of the heavy responsibility that rested on his shoulders. He had no taste for drama, unlike Begin, nor was he blessed with a vivid imagination, like Herzl. For better and for worse, he lived in the real world. He had no idea how to change it, though he knew that he had to do just that.

But these explanations are only the foam upon the waves. Deep under the surface, powerful currents were at work. They pushed Rabin off course and in the end they swallowed him.

Rabin was a child of the classic Zionist ideology. He never rebelled against it. He carried in his body the genetic code of the Zionist movement, a movement whose aim from the beginning was to turn the Land of Israel into an exclusively Jewish state, which denied the very existence of the Arab Palestinian people and whose logic ultimately meant their displacement.

Like most of his generation in the country, he absorbed this ideology with his mother’s milk, and was raised on it throughout. It shaped his ideas so thoroughly that he was not even aware of it. At the critical juncture of his life, he fell victim to an insoluble inner contradiction: his analytical mind told him to make peace with the Palestinians, to “give up” a part of the country and to dismantle the settlements, while his Zionist genetic heritage opposed this with all its might. That manifested itself visibly at the Oslo agreement signing ceremony: he offered his hand to Arafat because his mind commanded it, but all his body language expressed rejection.

It is impossible to make peace without a basic mental and emotional commitment to peace. Impossible to change the direction of a historic movement without reassessing its history. Impossible for a leader to steer his people towards a total change (as Ataturk did in Turkey, for example) if he is not completely devoted to the change himself. Impossible to make peace with an enemy without understanding his truth.

Rabin’s inner convictions continued to evolve after Oslo. Between him and Arafat, mutual respect grew. Perhaps he would have arrived, in his slow and cautious way, at the necessary mental change. The assassin and his handlers must have been afraid of this and decided to forestall it.

Rabin’s failure will find its expression at the memorial rally next week at the very place where we witnessed his murder, 14 years ago. The main speakers will be two of the gravediggers of the Oslo agreement, Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak, as well as Tzipi Livni and Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar, who belonged to the forces that created the climate for the murder. Rabin, I assume, will turn in his grave.

Will I be there? Not me, thank you very much.

THE TRANSFER AGREEMENT

Black’s father was a pre-WW II member of the Betar Zionist-Revisionist youth movement in Poland, when Menachem Begin was its Warsaw leader, and in 1983 Black was himself a member of the American branch of Herut, then the party of Prime Ministers Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, now subsumed in Bibi Netanyahu’s Revisionist Likud. Nevertheless, his 1983 edition Zionist critics were either extremely wary of the book, or intensely hostile.

When he first heard of the Ha’avara pact with the archenemy of his people, it was a nightmare: “The possibility of a Zionist-Nazi arrangement for the sake of Israel was inconceivable.”

He was correct to be shocked. In 1933, any German, Jew or gentile, who wanted to take money out of the country lost about 25% as it went out the door. But under the Ha’avara, a Jew turned over his money to a German bank and Germany shipped goods, steel pipes, etc. to Palestine, where they were sold by the World Zionost Organization. Later the WZO extended sales of these Nazi goods to the rest of the Middle East. The Nazis still deducted money from the transation, and the WZO did likewise, but the cuts were less than the percentage a Jew had to pay to send money elsewhere.

Even after he collected his wits, and decided to write about it, Black understood that he was walking straight into a political minefield:

My greatest worry is that the revelations of the book might be used by enemies of the Jewish people. For those who seek to besmirch the Zionist movement as racist and Nazi-like, this agreement might seem to be perfect ammunition.

Black’s Zionist reviewers were almost all hostile to him because he brazenly cheered the fact that the WZO didn’t fight Hitler. Arnost Lustig, writing in the 5/84 issue of the B’nai B’rith organ, The Jewish Monthly, said that “sometimes he gets into dangerous, carefree formulations that the critics will return to him like a boomerang.” A. J. Sherman reviewed Black’s book for the NY Times. He was out of sorts with Black for asking, rhetorically,

whether the Jewish architects of the agreement were men of madness or of genius. They were of course neither… they left to others the self-indulgence of ringing denunciations and posturings for the press, delivered in… the heady atmosphere of a crowded Madison Square Garden.

Henry Feingold told us in the 9/84 issue of the American Jewish Congress journal, Congress Monthly, that “both Nazis and Zionists had something in common. Neither believed that Jewish life in the Diaspora was desirable. They were both dissimilationists. It was that shared belief which made the Transfer Agreement possible…. For a propagandist who seeks to strike at the very core of Jewish sensibility, awareness of the Transfer Agreement is like a dream come true.” Black’s book “plays into the hands of those who seek to destroy the state of Israel.”

Eric Breindel took on Black in the 2/18/85 New Republic: “Black cannot evade responsibility for the uses to which his book is now being put by simply asserting, in his text, that suggestions of Zionist complicity in the Holocaust are ‘absurd.’”

Black responded to Breindel in the 4/29/85 New Republic:

Breindel links me with the anti-Zionist efforts of Arab propagandists, Soviet anti-Semites, and the anti-Zionist work of Lenni Brenner. That is so far from the truth, it is laughable. Indeed, Jewish leaders have felt that my book provided the precise document-by-document rebuttal to Brenner’s distortions, and encouraged the distribution of my book overseas.

I sent the NR a response to Black but, knowing they wouldn’t run it, I also sent it to him via his publisher, with a challenge:

“If you… believe that my books… are in need of refutation, the best way to try to do that is in debate.” By now it should come as no surprise that he didn’t accept my offer.

One can imagine Black’s dismay when he read a 6/84 speech by Louis Farrakhan:

The Zionists believed that they should get a homeland for the Jews and maintain that homeland, but they wanted to fulfill the vision without fulfilling the preconditions. So Zionists made a deal with Adolf Hitler. These are the same people that condemn me for saying Hitler was a great man, but a wicked man…. So for me to say that Hitler was great, I’ve made no mistake at all. He was great, but wickedly great, and the Zionists made a deal with Adolf Hitler according to a book called The Transfer Agreement by Edwin Black, one of their own kind….

This transfer agreement let 60,000 German Jews into Palestine and $100 million of their money into Palestine, where they began to take land away from the Palestinian people and little by little they gained strength and power and with the backing of the nations, they claimed that land to be theirs and they called it Israel. I say to the Jewish people and to the Government of the United States: the present state called Israel is an outlaw act…. and she will never have any peace, because there can be no peace structured on injustice, thievery, lying and deceit and using the name of God to shield your gutter religion under his holy name.

Black, his Zionist critics and Farrakhan were correct on one level or another. It is instinctual for post-civil rights movement Americans to suspect any group of oppressed who try to make a deal with their oppressor. Nevertheless, Black, well aware of what they did, tried to vindicate the Ha’avara:

It was one thing for the Zionists to subvert the anti-Nazi boycott… but soon Zionist leaders understood that the success of the future Jewish Palestinian economy would be inextricably bound up with the survivial of the Nazi economy…. If the Hitler economy fell both sides would be ruined.

However, he is so fanatically committed to Israel that he was driven to deceive himself with a totally false after-the-fact explanation for the traitorous pact:

As many Jews as possible had to be brought over from Germany as fast as possible – not to save their culture, not to save their wealth, but to save their lives…. The only way to continue the transfer and rescue was to bring over large groups of so-called capitalist emigrants.

In a subsequent article in the 5/84 Jewish Monthly, Black tried his own rescue operation – on the Ha’avara. Everyone knows that modern liberation movements are not supposed to be concerned only with saving capitalists, so he told us that the wealth of these German Jews “opened the gates to hundreds of thousands of working class Polish and Eastern European immigrants.”

Black claims he hired 50 people to help him research the period. He is completely familiar with the standard Holocaust literature. Yet he knowingly omitted anything from other scholars which would contradict his rescue fable. In 1983 this writer discovered that Black was working on his book, and inasmuch as my own Zionism In The Age Of The Dictators was about to be published, I wrote his editor, who put me in contact with Black. He presented me with his rescue theory. I asked if he was familiar with Abraham Margaliot’s article “The Problems Of The Rescue Of German Jewry During The Years 1933-1939: The Reasons For The Delay In Their Emigration From The Third Reich,” found in Rescue Attempts During The Holocaust, a tome issued by the Yad Vashem Institute, Israel’s Holocaust study center. Of course he had read it, but he was quick to tell me that he was “the person who knows more about the transfer than any person alive.”

Margaliot had described a 1935 speech by Chaim Weizmann, later Israel’s first President:

He declared that the Zionist movement would have to choose between the immediate rescue of Jews and the establishment of a national project which would ensure lasting redemption for the Jewish people. Under the
circumstances, the movement, according to Weizmann, must choose the later course.

Margaliot quoted Labor Zionist leader Berl Katznelson’s 1933 statement that “we know that we are not able to transfer all of German Jewry and will have to choose on the basis of the cruel criterion of Zionism.” Two-thirds of the German Jews who applied to the World Zionist Organization for immigration certificates in 1933-35 were rejected while no less than 6,307 Zionist cadre were brought to Palestine from Britain, South Africa, Turkey and the Western Hemisphere.

Rescue was never the WZO’s priority. Black knew of a 12/7/38 speech by David Ben-Gurion, quoted by Yoav Gelber in Yad Vashem Studies, vol. XII. In the wake of the dreadful Kristalnacht pogrom, the British, hoping to ease pressure on them to admit more immigrants to Palestine, offered to take in thousands of Jewish children directly into Britain. But Ben-Gurion, later Israel’s first Prime Minister, solemnly declared that

If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the people of Israel.

Black wouldn’t debate me in the 1980s, but I’m going to challenge him again, via his publisher, Dialog Press: If Black thinks that the WZO did the right thing re Hitler in the 1930s and that I falsely accused them of collaborating with Nazism, lets debate it now, in 2009, over the internet and let the world public decide!

KILLING KASZTNER: THE JEW WHO DEALT WITH THE NAZIS

Gaylen Ross’s film is three documentaries rolled into one. Labor Zionist Rezso Kasztner negotiated with Adolf Eichmann in Hungary in 1944. In 1953, Israel prosecuted pamphleteer Malchiel Gruenwald for libeling Kasztner as a collaborator.

On 4/25/44, Eichmann summoned Laborite Joel Brand, and sent him to negotiate with the WZO and the Allies. The SS would allow a million Jews to leave for Spain in exchange for 10,000 trucks, soap, coffee and other supplies. The trucks were to be used exclusively on the eastern front. As a token of good faith, Eichmann authorized Kasztner to organize a preliminary convoy of 600 Jews to Palestine. Brand never thought that the Western Allies would accept the proposition. He believed that worried SS officers wanted to invest in their futures. Live Jews were negotiable currency. Brand hoped to decoy the Nazis into thinking a deal could be made. Possibly extermination would slow down or stop while an accord was worked out. But Britain notified Stalin and publicly denounced the offer as a trick to divide the Allies.

While historians complain about how the WZO and Britain handled the Brand affair, the central issue is Kasztner’s role in Hungary. Eichmann allowed him to organise the convoy, ultimately a train to Switzerland, and place family and friends on it. Gruenwald denounced Kasztner for silence re German lies that Hungary’s Jews were only being resettled at Kenyermezo, then part of Hungary, now in Rumania.

The Labor Party got more than it bargained for. Shmuel Tamir, a brilliant cross-examiner, appeared for Gruenwald. On 6/21/55, Judge Benyamin Halevi found there had been no libel, apart from the fact that Kasztner hadn’t been motivated by monetary gain. His collaboration crucially aided the Nazis in murdering 450,000 Jews and, after the war, he compounded his offence by going to the defence of SS murderer Kurt Becher.

On 3/3/57 Kasztner was assassinated. Zeev Eckstein confessed to killing him, claiming that he was a government agent who had infiltrated a right-wing Zionist terrorist group. However, on 1/17/58 the Supreme Court handed down its decision in the Kasztner-Gruenwald case. It ruled, 5 to 0, that Kasztner perjured himself on behalf of Becher. It then concluded, 3 to 2, that what he did during the war couldn’t be legally considered collaboration. Judge Shlomo Chesin argued that

He didn’t warn Hungarian Jewry of the danger facing it because he didn’t think it would be useful, and because he thought that any deeds resulting from information given them would damage more than help …. The question is not whether a man is allowed to kill many in order to save a few, or vice-versa. The question is altogether in another sphere and should be defined as follows: a man is aware that a whole community is awaiting its doom. He is allowed to make efforts to save a few, although part of his efforts involve concealment of truth from the many; or should he disclose the truth to many though it is his best opinion that this way everybody will perish. I think the answer is clear. What good will the blood of the few bring if everyone is to perish?

Ross filmed Eckstein apologizing to Kasztner’s daughter, Zsuzsi, who defends her father’s deeds. Killing Kasztner is at its worst dealing with the collaborator, but the parts about the assassin and the daughter are new and automatically interesting, regardless of what they think.

Many Israelis refused to accept the verdict. Had Kasztner lived, Labor would have been in difficulty. Between the trial and the Supreme Court decision, Tamir uncovered evidence that Kasztner also intervened for SS Colonel Hermann Krumey. He sent the court at Nuremberg an affidavit: “Krumey performed his duties in a laudable spirit of good will, at a time when the life and death of many depended on him.”

During Eichmann’s 1961 trial, Brand’s cousin, André Biss, who worked with Kasztner and supported his policy, offered to testify. He had more contact with Eichmann than any other witness. An appearance was set, but Prosecutor Gideon Hausner discovered that Biss would defend Kasztner’s activities. He knew that there would be immense outcry. He also knew that Eichmann, in Argentina, followed the libel trial and described his relationship with Kasztner in interviews taped by a Dutch Nazi in 1955. Parts were later published in the 11/28 and 12/5/60 issues of Life magazine after his capture in 1960. The tapes showed how Eichmann might implicate Kasztner. And Halevi was one of the trial judges.

Israel gained prestige from Eichmann’s capture. The Labor government didn’t want the focus of the trial to shift away from him to a re-examination of Labor’s Holocaust record. According to Biss’s book, A Million Jews to Save, Hausner asked him “to omit from my evidence any mention of our action in Budapest, and especially to pass over in silence what was then in Israel called the ‘Kasztner affair’.” Biss refused and was dropped as a witness.

Eichmann had described “Kastner” [Life’s anglicised Kasztner] as

young man about my age, an ice-cold lawyer and a fanatical Zionist. He agreed to help keep the Jews from resisting deportation – and even keep order in the collection camps – if I would close my eyes and let a few hundred or a few thousand young Jews emigrate illegally to Palestine. It was a good bargain. For keeping order in the camps, the price of 15,000 or 20,000 Jews – in the end there may have been more – was not too high for me. Except perhaps for the first few sessions, Kastner never came to me fearful of the Gestapo strong man. We negotiated entirely as equals. People forget that. We were political opponents trying to arrive at a settlement, and we trusted each other perfectly. When he was with me, Kastner smoked cigarettes as though he were in a coffeehouse. While we talked he would smoke one aromatic cigarette after another, taking them from a silver case and lighting them with a little silver lighter. With his great polish and reserve he would have made an ideal Gestapo officer himself.

Dr Kastner’s main concern was to make it possible for a select group of Hungarian Jews to emigrate to Israel…. As a matter of fact, there was a very strong similarity between our attitudes in the SS and the viewpoint of these immensely idealistic Zionist leaders who were fighting what might be their last battle. As I told Kastner: ‘We, too, are idealists and we, too, had to sacrifice our own blood before we came to power.’

I believe that Kastner would have sacrificed a thousand or a hundred thousand of his blood to achieve his political goal. He was not interested in old Jews or those who had become assimilated into Hungarian society. But he was incredibly persistent in trying to save biologically valuable Jewish blood – that is, human material that was capable of reproduction and hard work. ‘You can have the others’ he would say, ‘but let me have this group here.’ And because Kastner rendered us a great service by helping keep the deportation camps peaceful, I would let his groups escape. After all, I was not concerned with small groups of a thousand or so Jews.

In 1961, Ben Hecht, a celebrity American Zionist journalist, wrote Perfidy, an expose of the Kasztner scandal, presenting pages of Tamir’s demolition of Kasztner’s defense.

Tamir: How do you account for the fact that more people were selected from Kluj [Kasztner’s home town] to be rescued than from any other Hungarian town?
Kastner: That had nothing to do with me.
Tamir: I put it to you that you specifically requested favoritism for your people in Kluj from Eichmann.
Kastner: Yes, I asked for it specifically.

Kasztner made things up on the witness stand:

Kastner: All the local Rescue Committees were under my jurisdiction.
Tamir: Committees! You speak in the plural.
Kastner: Yes – wherever they existed.
Tamir: Where else except in Kluj was there such a committee?
Kastner: Well, I think the committee in Kluj was the only one in Hungary.

After Eichmann’s execution, Zionist-Nazi relations were debated in Israel but, excepting articles by East German Klaus Polkehn and Faris Glubb’s PLO pamphlet, Zionist Relations With Nazi Germany, the issue dropped out of international concern until the 1980s, with Zionism in the Age of the Dictators and Black’s book. My text was reviewed by London Times editor Edward Mortimer, who hailed it as “short, crisp and carefully documented.” This attracted the attention of Jim Allen, a leading British TV playwright, who wrote a 1987 stage play, Perdition, titled after Hecht’s Perfidy, based on my Hungarian Holocaust chapter. Two days before its opening, the Royal Court Upstairs canceled it under Zionist pressure.

It turned into a Zionist disaster. Jim had no trouble getting nationwide prime time Diverse Reports to set up a debate. He, Marion Woolfson and I took on Zionist Martin Gilbert, the Churchill family’s appointed historian, Hungarian-born Stephen Roth, chair of the local Zionist Federation, who worked with Kasztner, and Holocaust survivor Rabbi Hugo Gryn.

Our side met with Perdition’s director, Ken Loach. He gave us our debate roles: “Marion, you defend the public’s right to see the play and make up their own minds re Kasztner. Jim, you defend the additions and subtractions you were making in the run up to opening night. Lenni, you back him up with documents.”

I returned to the US the morning after the debate. I took the Underground to Heathrow, getting into a car via an end door. In little time I realized that many folks were looking at me. As others got on and saw people looking in one direction, they did likewise. A packed car arrived at the airport, looking at me with smiles on every face. Finally, one guy said “You won.” “I think we won. But I’d like to know why you think we won?” “We had the right to see the play and make up our own minds, Jim was making last minute changes, as playwrights do, and you backed him up with solid documentation.”

Readers understand my ego-boost as a historian and debater. But Ken was the star of that show. David Lan wrote up the debate in the 4/2/87 London Review of Books. He explained why those Brits looked at me:

The High Court of Justice in London, 1967. Dr. Miklos Yaron, a Hungarian gynaecologist, is suing his former assistant Ruth Kaplan for libel. Kaplan has published a pamphlet accusing Yaron of collaboration with Nazi leaders in 1944….

Is there anyone in Britain interested in the theatre, in civil liberties or in Jews who can’t identify this as a scene in Jim Allen’s play Perdition? The successful lobbying by Jews in Britain to have its production cancelled has made it one of the most famous plays of the decade.

Zionist Holocaust historian David Cesarani, involved in the Royal Court purge, confessed, in London’s 3 July 1987 Jewish Chronicle, that the public thought the theatre “had been bullied into censoring the play.”

Fanatics don’t know when to quit. In 1943, Nathan Schwalb, Labor’s Swiss representative, had written a letter to party comrades in Slovakia:

About the cries coming from your country, we should know that all the Allied nations are spilling much of their blood, and if we do not sacrifice any blood, by what right shall we merit coming before the bargaining table when they divide nations and lands at the war’s end? Therefore it is silly, even impudent, on our part to ask these nations who are spilling their blood to permit their money into enemy countries in order to protect our blood – for only with blood shall we get the land. But in respect to you, my friends, atem taylu, and for this purpose I am sending you money illegally with this messenger.

Schwalb sued Allen, who found his letter in my book and put it in Perdition. Allen had to publish Perdition with blank space where a character quoted it. But there was a judicial day of reckoning. London’s 27/11/92 Jewish Chronicle lamented: “The collapse of a libel action has allowed… Perdition to be published in full…. The action… collapsed due to lack of evidence.”

Kasztner’s libel trial lies about his post-war efforts on Becher’s behalf, denounced even by the Supreme Court, were the bedrock of Israeli hatred of Kasztner:

Tamir: And how did it happen that Kurt Becher, a high-ranking SS leader and war criminal, was acquitted at Nuremberg as a result of your intervention and testimony?

Kasztner: That’s a lie! I never testified for him!

Zionist Holocaust scholar Walter Laqueur described the after effects in the 12/55 Commentary:

“With that, he had fallen into Tamir’s trap…. For Kastner had testified at Nuremberg, on August 4, 1947, asking that Becher’s services be accorded the ‘fullest possible consideration’…. worse was to follow… Kastner had stated that the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization had authorized him to give his testimony in Becher’s behalf.” Laqueur insisted that “this turned out not to be so,” but a 1997 article in The Journal of Israeli History by Shoshona Barri (Ishoni) documented that this was true.

She traced the evolution of Kasztner’s statements re Eichman’s crew:

In September 1945, he made two statements before the American Committee for the Investigation of War Crimes…. The first described the destruction of the Jews… mentioning Krumey as the one who had headed the implementation of Eichmann’s murderous program…. The second statement described Becher and Wisliceny as war criminals whose only reason for benevolent activity during the final months of the war (including the preservation of Kastner’s own life) had been to provide themselves with alibis; they sensed the impending defeat of the Nazis and the subsequent end of the war.

Eliahu Dobkin of the Jewish Agency, the WZO’s Palestine executive body, testified at the 1954 trial. Barri (Ishoni) tells us that

when Dobkin was called to the witness stand, he denied ever having heard Becher’s name… Kastner sent a letter to Justice Halevi in which he attempted to prove that… Dobkin had been scheduled during the war to meet Becher in Lisbon as part of the rescue attempts. He had also been party to the Jewish Agency’s rescue work and was therefore familiar with all reports issued on rescue activities, including Kastner’s own report (which had been written in 1946)…. Kastner claimed that it was impossible that this man should not be familiar with Becher’s name. This claim of Kastner’s sounds quite plausible. Dobkin was indeed about to meet Becher during the war…. Becher’s name appeared innumerable times in Kastner’s own report.

She explains that the WZO was trying to get its hands on the ‘Becher deposit,’ “money and valuables taken from the Jews of Hungary and later turned over by Becher to [Moshe] Schweiger acting on behalf of the Rescue Committee” run by Kasztner. “This treasure was then taken from Schweiger by the American forces.” Barri (Ishoni) discovered that “there was a total of seven interventions by Kastner on behalf of Nazi war criminals…. Certainly the Jewish Agency knew of some of them… archival sources suggest the probability that the Jewish Agency was aware of them all.”

She explained that

Members of the Jewish Agency… were concerned that… the Jewish people. lacking a state, was not represented in the Nuremberg court…. Kastner, as one who was acquainted with top ranking Nazis, could testify as to their activities, and could at the same time report on the trials’ proceedings. These were the reasons for his employment at Nuremberg. It is therefore difficult to accept the picture painted during the 1954 trial and thereafter, that Kastner’s sojourn in Nuremberg was entirely on his own initiative.

Ever since the 1954 trial, Israeli historians and dramatists have tried to explain Kasztner’s Becher intervention. Barri (Ishoni) said that

This article does support the view that Kastner underwent psychological processes that influenced his testimonies…. Psychologists use the term ‘cognitive dissonance’ to describe what happens to someone who has performed an act in the past that is difficult to live with.

Among Barri (Ishoni)’s major contributions to the discussion is detailing Jewish Agency use of Kasztner in their chase after the Becher deposit and adding that as a factor explaining his obviously morbid character development. Gaylen Ross certainly knows Barri (Ishoni)’s development of the JA’s role, but the documentary focused on Kasztner, not the JA’s role, which is not an artistic sin. Therefore this discussion follows her line of thought and doesn’t develop the JA’s involvement in this morbid tale. Readers interested in that should go directly to her excellent article.

New York’s 10/23 Jewish Week says that “Ross became inspired several years ago when when… she heard sociologist Egon Mayer, who who was one of the “Kasztner Jews,” say that the train represented ‘the single largest successful rescue of Jews by Jews during the Holocaust.’” The NY Times review focuses on his mother, Hedy Mayer, “several months pregnant when she boarded Mr. Kasztner’s train.” As I edited 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration With The Nazis, published in 2002, I discovered Mayer’s website devoted to defending Kasztner. It quoted his 1946 German Bericht or Report, unpublished in English, so I went to him and asked for a copy:

“I want to read it because I don’t want to be blindsided, unaware of evidence exhonorating him. If I find any such, I’ll run it.”

I meant it, but I expected to get a big no, given my condemnation of Mayer’s hero. When Egon realized that I was a serious scholar, he not only gave me the Bericht, he gave me a translation he had privately made for him. Ultimately I showed Egan the 33 pages of excerpts that I wanted to put in the book. “Was it fair to Kasztner?” “Run it.” Total cooperation with someone who opposes your politics is otherworldly saintliness. Later yet, he told me that he was “a demographer, not a historian. What I don’t understand is how Zionism evolved from a basically secular movement into one overrun with religious fanatics.” I told him that I’d contact him and we would set a time for such a serious discussion. Days later he got sick, was hospitalize and died.

An obituary cited his open cooperative character. Indeed I’ve met people of many different politics including my own. But few of their deaths upset me as much as Egon’s. In his memory, I donated a copy of the yet unpublished Report to the Jewish Room of New York’s 42nd Street Public Library. And now memory of him makes me declare that Zsuzsi Kasztner may think her father was a hero and still be a nice person. He collaborated with Eichmann, not her. Defending her father is a very human mistake. But he was the collaborator that Hecht and Allen and I say he was.

Hart has the credentials to tackle the subject of Zionism (specifically, political Zionism: that a certain collection of non-native people has a, purportedly, God-given right to a particular piece of real estate that overrides the rights of Indigenous Palestinians) having worked for over three decades covering history unfolding in the Middle East. Much of his experience is first hand. The False Messiah is volume one of, what is planned to be, a three or four volume series Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews.

Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews
Volume One: The False Messiah
By Alan Hart
Paperback: 337 pages
Publisher: Clarity Press (2009)
ISBN-10: 0932863647
ISBN-13: 9780932863645

Disseminating information that challenges the immensely influential Zionist bloc is difficult. Hart wrote, “… all in the UK were too frightened to publish this book out of fear of offending Zionism too much and being falsely accused of promoting anti-Semitism.” Here Hart exposes the absurd inversion of morality: Zionists accuse defenders of Palestinian human rights as being racist against the abuser of Palestinian human rights!

Hart identifies it as a smear tactic and a phony one since Arabs are Semites.

That the morality of Zionism is challengeable was keenly illustrated by an exchange between Hart and erstwhile Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. Hart queried Meir on-air: “You are saying that if ever Israel was in danger of being defeated on the battlefield, it would be prepared to take the region and even the whole world down with it?”

Meir’s prompt response: “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

How do Zionists get away with crimes against humanity? Hart points to the suffering Zionists experienced in the WWII Holocaust. To this an obvious question arises: does victimization give the victims the right to victimize another people?

Paulo Freire in his opus Pedagogy of the Oppressed warned that oppression creates a recycling dynamic that dehumanizes not only the oppressed people but also the oppressor. Hart touches on this dynamic.

Zionism and Judaism

Hart has to cover a lot of ground.

He points out that Zionism is not Judaism. Hart describes Zionism as “brutal and cruel [behaviors], driven by self-righteousness of an extraordinary kind, without regard for international law and human rights conventions” which “makes a mockery of the moral values and ethical values of Judaism.”

Hart does not delve deeply into these moral and ethical values of Judaism, but he leaves this reader with the impression that Judaism is an principled faith. However, the laws and morality underlying many religions are often interpreted variously. The late Israel Shahak, a chemistry professor and social justice activist, in his book Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years rued that classical Judaism had been subverted toward profit and Jewish supremacism. I submit that much as no people should be seen as a monolith neither should a religion be regarded as a monolith.

The Legitimacy of a Jewish Claim to the Holy Land

Hart reasons that there is no legitimacy to Israel’s claim to a “right to exist.” Moreover, the Jewish claim to the Holy Land does not hold up under scrutiny.

The bloodlines of the majority of Israeli Jews do not tie them with the Holy Land. Ashkenazim stem from eastern and central Europe and are converts to Judaism. Hart cites the work of Joseph Reinach, Alfred Lilienthal, Arthur Koestler, and Shlomo Sand in outlining this case. The refutation of Jewishness as an ethnicity is important because, quoting Sand, “…it encourages a segregation that separates Jews from non-Jews” that allows Zionists to claim Israel as a Jewish state.

Furthermore, writes Hart, the Mizrahim (Semitic Jews indigenous to the Middle East) were strongly opposed to Zionism.

Hart focuses on two different sets of Jews: Haskala Jews who sought to make the place they lived their home and Zionist Jews who strive to separate Jews and Gentiles. Haskala Jews see themselves threatened by a backlash to crimes committed by Zionist Jews.

Early Zionism

Hart paints a picture of early Zionist history and the roles of early Zionist figures such as Zionism’s “founding father,” Theodr Herzl, key lobbyist, Chaim Weizmann, and the financier of Zionism, Lionel de Rothschild.

Hart details the collaboration of Britain with the Zionists from Arthur Balfour whose letter provided a pretext to dispossess Arabs. The chicanery was such that Britain reneged on its promise to recognize the sovereignty of its WWI Arab allies. Britain, writes Hart, laid the foundations for a Zionist takeover: “Without the British presence Zionism could not have entrenched itself in Palestine. On their own the Palestinians could have pushed the Zionists out.”

Britain went so far as to declare war on the Palestinians and assassinate Palestinian leaders.

All along the way, Zionist Jews were opposed by Haskala Jews who, as history shows, always lost out. After WWII, the Holocaust card was effective at backing down Haskala Jews.

Yet, Zionism has also flourished among Jews living abroad. Citing humanist Lilienthal: the migrating Jews carried a “nation complex” within them. According to Hart, this “made many of them susceptible to Zionism’s nationalist propaganda.”

Later, Zionists such as Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and Vladimir Jabotinsky would terrorize the British out of Mandate Palestine. Hart sources Ralph Schoenman on the Koening Memorandum that made transparent the Zionists’s plans for terrorism against Palestinians: “We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.”

Israel today, Hart notes, defines legitimate Palestinian resistance as terrorism. The author holds, “… all peoples have the right to use all means including violence to resist occupation.”

The US and Zionism

As Imperial Britain headed into decline, Imperial USA was ascending. The US would have a greater role in the Middle East.

Hart lauds US president Woodrow Wilson, “a real, towering statesman, a true giant among men.” Woodrow was apparently hamstrung on Palestine by his lobbying for the League of Nations. Hart blames “Imperial Britain-and-Zionism and their allies in [the US] Congress and the media; with … France” for screwing Wilson on Palestine.

Hart presents many “what if” scenarios. For example, he quotes British official John Hope Simpson: “Had the Jewish authorities been content with the original object of settlement in Palestine – a Jewish life without oppression and persecution in accordance with Jewish customs – the national home would have presented no difficulty.”

Or what if president Franklin Roosevelt had not died when he did? Hart speculates that Roosevelt would have rejected a Jewish state in Palestine.

Hart identifies influential Zionist agents in the White House, among others, David K. Niles. Although Truman is depicted as a president who grappled with the Zionist lobby, he had a vulnerability exploitable by Zionists.

Biting the Hand that Feeds

Ends would justify the means for Zionists. Even though Britain had set the stage for Jewish immigration to Palestine, even though Britain was at war with Nazi Germany — Zionists sought out a possible collaboration with Britain’s wartime enemy and an enemy to Jews. Hart sources Marxist writer Lenni Brenner who disclosed the Zionist negotiations with Nazi Germany. Zionists were dedicated to thwarting Jewish immigration to elsewhere than Palestine and were even willing to sacrifice Jewish lives to realize the goal of a Jewish state in Palestine.

And it was Jewish terrorism that forced Britain out of Palestine.

Zionism and Terrorism

The Zionist plan was to drive the British out, then drive the Palestinians out. Hart relates the strategy of the man who would become Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, for keeping all the land: creating facts-on-the-ground. The problem with this strategy is that if old facts-on-the-ground can be erased to establish new ones, what is to stop new facts-on-the-ground from being created again?

The methods for creating these facts-on-the-ground were incredibly gruesome. The massacre at Deir Yassin is a historical testament to Zionist war crimes – “in its own tiny way it was another holocaust.” The village was a “soft and easy target”; “the butchers of Deir Yassin” killed 254 victims, mainly the elderly, women, and children. One-hundred-and-forty-five women were killed, 35 of them pregnant. Many were raped before being killed.

Hart quotes Mordechai Nisan of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem: “Without terror it is unlikely that Jewish independence would have been achieved when it was.” [emphasis added by Hart]

Abdul Khader, portrayed as a respected Palestinian resistance leader, died the day after the Deir Yassin Massacre. Gloom set in on the Palestinian side. Deir Yassin had its intended effect, sowing fear in the hearts of Palestinians, and the expulsion was underway.

Arab and International Complicity with Zionism

The Palestinians did not just have to deal with British treachery, they “were at the mercy of the Arab League” who at British insistence kept the Palestinians unarmed, much as the illegal sealing of Gaza’s borders today and control of the West Bank borders keeps Palestinians unarmed under brutal occupation and creeping dispossession.

Hart wonders: what if the Arab regimes of the time had sought an alliance with Stalin to defeat Zionism? He speculates that Truman might have had to stand up to Zionism.

Hart points out that the United Nations General Assembly, in defiance of its own charter which calls for respect for the principle of self-determination, would, aided by Zionist manipulation (disinformation, bribery, threats), decree an illegal partition of Mandate Palestine. Not only was the partition illegal, he argues, it was also unfair. Jews would receive 56.4 percent of the land while being 33 percent of the population and owning only 5.67 percent of the land. The valuable coastal and fertile areas were in Jewish hands while mountainous, infertile areas were left to the Palestinians. Hart calls it “a proposal for injustice on a massive scale.”

In the end, Truman capitulated to Zionism and recognized the partition. Truman had been subjected to “a political hit-squad of 26 pro-Zionist U.S. Senators” beholden to Jewish votes and money.

Truman’s secretary of state George Marshall resisted Zionism, putting “America’s national interests first and, to the limit of the possible within that context, doing what was legally and morally right.” Joining Marshall in opposition was US secretary of defense James Vincent Forrestal who might have been the most steadfast opponent of the corrupting influence of Jewish money on the Democratic Party had he not, according to Hart, died under suspicious circumstances. Nonetheless, the Zionists had access to a more influential actor on Truman.

Hart takes a sympathetic slant toward Truman, noting he had kept the Zionist lobby at bay until it discovered his Achilles heel: his good friend Eddie Jacobson, a non-Zionist Jew. Through Jacobson, Zionists could reach Truman.

It appears that Truman, although much irked by the selfishness of the Zionist lobby, bore much of the responsibility for opening the door to the influence of money from lobbyists. Grant F. Smith in his book America’s Defense Line supports this view: “The historical record reveals how Truman’s policy on the Palestine question became heavily influenced by his need for campaign contributions…” Smith credits Truman with starting a “competition to see who was more ‘pro-Israel’” among US presidential candidates. Smith presents evidence that Truman was swayed by “massive funds” for his 1948 presidential campaign raised with the help of arch-Zionist Abraham J. Feinberg.

The Brazilian pedagogue Freire theoretically described — without referring to it –what underlies the Zionist-Palestinian dynamic: that of the oppressor and the oppressed. Freire argued that oppression and the struggle of liberation from oppression are both oppressing. Oppression, he contends, is necrophilic. “Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in ‘changing the consciousness of the oppressed, not the situation that oppresses them.’”

To overcome the oppressor-oppressed dynamic, the oppressed must see themselves as agents of change. Revolution requires solidarity, and this, said Freire, is achieved through love — affirmation of one’s humanity. The act of rebellion by the oppressed is a gesture of love. The desire to be human saves oppressors from their own dehumanization caused by oppressing other humans.

“It is only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves, can free their oppressors,” wrote Freire.

Many Haskala Jews believe that liberation for all Jews will come from Palestinians achieving their liberation.

This looks like the direction Hart is heading with his Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews series. Volume One: The False Messiah is an important reference on what has transpired in the lead up to and formation of the Jewish State by Zionists. He brings valuable first-hand perspective, such as what lay behind Meir’s statement that there were no Palestinian people.

Hart gives a human face to some of the historical protagonists, portraying them not merely as actors but delving into the character of the persons. It is as if Hart seeks to humanize some of the persons who capitulated to Zionism.

However, there is no reason that evil should always appear in the guise of a demon. Humans come in all shades. Evil acts are evil despite the appearance of the evil-doer. Yes, it is probably much easier to perpetrate evil acts in cherubic rather that demonic guise, but why play to such stereotypes?

Hart’s book is a good act, a brave act for someone from British state media. He says he has to live with himself, and it is obvious this book comes from a place of integrity. Volume One: The False Messiah augurs well for the rest of the series.

Even if the stock market can be shored up by more government borrowing for “stimulus” spending, it’s a temporary reprieve, because nothing can bring back the consumer purchasing power that was lost when the banks stopped pumping money into the economy through out-of-control mortgage lending. We simply no longer have the job base for people to earn the income they need to live.

The underlying cause of the crisis is in fact the debt-based monetary system, whereby the U.S. ruling class long ago sold out our nation and its people to the international banking cartel of which the Rockefeller and Morgan interests have been the chief representatives for over a century. It was lending on a previously unheard of scale for overpriced assets to people and businesses unable to repay that created the bubbles that burst in 2008, not only in the housing market but also in such areas as commercial real estate, equities, commodities, and derivatives. It was an explosion that reverberated throughout the world.

The Obama administration’s response to the crisis has been to print Treasury bonds both for the financial system bailouts and the sputtering Keynesian stimulus that so far has gone substantially into military infrastructure. This bond bubble is what I have referred to as “Obama’s Last Picture Show.”

Government debt is fundamentally inflationary. For a generation, the U.S. dollar has been inflating at an increasing rate, with the economy being kept in a growth posture by selling our debt instruments abroad or allowing foreigners holding dollars to purchase property and other assets on our own soil. The website EconomyinCrisis.org reports that in 2007, the most recent year for which data are available, “foreign entities spent $267.8 billion to acquire or establish U.S. businesses.”

Foreigners are spending their dollars as fast as possible, because they are now plummeting in value. It’s increasingly clear that sooner rather than later, the dollar will be dumped by foreign purchasers of bonds, particularly China, and possibly even the oil-producing nations.

These nations know full well that bonds denominated in dollars can never be completely repaid, even if the bonds can be rolled over into fresh debt. It’s this dynamic that is dragging the U.S. economy to the cliff, because real economic growth stopped long ago when our manufacturing jobs were exported. This is because most of the growth since Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 has been only on paper through financial bubbles. This included the dot.com bubble of the Clinton years that blew up in 2000-2001.

Now, after the Treasury bond bubble of 2009, there is nothing left in America to inflate. With so many jobs gone, the American family home was the last thing of value we owned.

So the air is going out of the tires. Americans who are struggling to work for a living are passive spectators as their jobs, savings, health insurance, pensions, and homes continue to erode in value or even disappear. Last Sunday the Washington Post reported a massive crisis in state and local government pensions. Reporter David Cho wrote, “The financial crisis has blown a hole in the rosy forecasts of pension funds that cover teachers, police officers and other government employees, casting into doubt as never before whether these public systems will be able to keep their promises to future generations of retirees.”

So what, if anything, can be done about it?

Well, the first thing an intelligent physician does is diagnose the disease. Thomas Greco, in his new book The End of Money and the Future of Civilization (Chelsea Green: 2009) , outlines the increasingly familiar story of how things got so bad, and he tells it as well as anyone has ever done. His style is precise and sometimes academic. Behind it, though, is a passion for truth and the type of rock-solid integrity that refuses to sugar-coat a very bitter pill.

More than that, Greco writes about how to change what has gone wrong. His credentials as an engineer, college professor, author, and consultant are impeccable. His book is among the most important written in this decade. It is truly a book that can alter the world and, if taken seriously, give large numbers of people a practical way to survive the gathering catastrophe.

But unlike most commentators, what Greco offers is not another phony prescription for what the financiers and government should do for us, whether through “restarting” lending or another round of stimulus spending. Rather it’s what we should do for ourselves, and could do much better, if we understood what to do and if big banking and big government just got out of the way.

As I said, at the root is the monetary system, whose failure cannot be understood without a history lesson. So Greco writes about the struggle between banking and democracy that took place in the 1790s when the ink on our new national constitution was barely dry.

It was Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the treasury, who compromised the new nation, through what he admitted was “corruption,” by giving the wealthy speculators in Revolutionary War bonds the benefit of federally-sponsored redemption and then by establishing the First Bank of the United States. This early drift toward elitist rule was opposed by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and others who figured in the creation of what later became the Democratic Party.

Greco writes: “While Jefferson favored a stronger union than that which emerged under the Articles of Confederation, he was vehemently opposed to the reconstruction of monarchic government on the American continent.” Hamilton had said frankly that the British monarchy was the best system of government known to man. Part of the monarchic system was the Bank of England, which Hamilton copied when setting up the First Bank.

But Jefferson, who repudiated Hamilton’s elitist platform, was elected president in what was then called “The Revolution of 1800.” Congress refused to renew the Bank’s charter by a single vote when it was up for renewal in 1811.

But the Second Bank of the United States was chartered in 1816 due to the government debt left behind from the War of 1812 against Great Britain. Thus was set up what became known as the “Bank War.”

It was President Andrew Jackson who dethroned the bankers from power by pulling government funds out of the Second Bank in 1833. Greco writes that in Jackson’s view: “The ‘Bank War’ was a contest for rulership—would the United States be governed by the people through their elected president and representatives, or by an unelected financial elite through their central bank instrument?”

The modern takeover began in earnest during the Civil War when Congress passed the National Banking Acts in 1863-64 which mandated use of government bonds as bank lending reserves, thereby creating a direct linkage between bank profits and the debt the government was starting to load on the shoulders of taxpayers.

The nation’s fate was sealed with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913. The deal was that the bankers would control the currency, and thereby the nation’s economy, while the government would be provided with an unlimited amount of inflated dollars to fight its wars.

The bookkeeper’s trick of creating money out of thin air, charging interest for its use, then forcing it down the throats of weaker nations by threat of violence, is what has allowed the Anglo-American empire, since the founding of the Bank of England in 1696, gradually to conquer the world. Though President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act into law, he saw what that action meant. Greco cites Wilson as writing: “There has come about an extraordinary and very sinister concentration in the control of business in the country…. The great monopoly in this country is the monopoly of big credits.”

Among other ill effects, the system has ruined the value of the currency. The inflation caused by large issues of bank-created loans is seized upon by the government which goes along because inflation reduces the cost of its deficits. Investors buy Treasury bonds denominated in Federal Reserve Notes then watch their value evaporate over time. In fact Federal Reserve Notes have lost over 95 percent of their value since they were first introduced.

Moreover, it’s additional inflation caused by bank-generated interest that drives up the costs of goods and services, forcing everyone in the economy to try to defend themselves by raising their prices to the max. Greco spells this out too, which almost every economist in the world, with the exception perhaps of Australia’s James Cumes, overlooks.

Bank interest has other tragic effects. It was high interest rates, for instance, that destroyed the Idaho potato industry. A farmer from that region told me at a conference a few years ago that when interest rates skyrocketed in the early 1980s, he asked the president of one of the Federal Reserve Banks why they did it. The answer was they were “ordered” to raise interest rates by the international banking system.

Make no mistake, it’s the banking system, facilitated by the Fed, not unwary borrowers, who brought on the collapse of 2008.

Now, in 2009, the bankers, mainly those in the U.S., have so shattered the world economy by debt mounted on debt that there may be no reprieve except the creation of a slave society based on rule by the rich over the masses of whatever peons should happen to survive the downturn and its tragic effects on employment, health, the food and water supply, and even our ability to cope with climate change.

The political establishment, expressing itself in pronouncements by organizations like the Council on Foreign Relations, see a future, not of economic democracy or increased financial pluralism, but consolidation of world currencies into a small number overseen at the top by the world’s financial oligarchy. Citing the writings of Benn Steil, the CFR’s Director of International Economics, Greco writes: “The ostensible plan is to reduce global exchange media to three—one each for Europe, the Americas, and Asia. One might reasonably suppose that at a later stage, those three would be combined into one currency also under the control of the global banking elite.”

Greco concludes: “The New World Order is upon us.”

With ample justification, he even goes apocalyptic, citing The Book of Revelation in demonstrating the import on a spiritual plane of the elitist takeover: “And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” (Revelation 13: 16-17)

But is it really the end, or is there a new world waiting to be born? Greco thinks so. He speaks of the end of an era when unlimited economic growth fed by massive influxes of debt-based money is no longer sustainable. He writes: “That our global civilization cannot continue on its current path seems evident….But I think our collective consciousness is beginning to change. We are becoming aware of limits and are reaching that part of our evolutionary program that says, ‘Stop!’”

Part of the awareness of how to stop must focus on the institutions responsible for the crisis. Greco praises Ron Paul for calling out the Federal Reserve in the 2008 presidential campaign. He cites a statement Paul made to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in a 2004 hearing where Paul told Greenspan that the power of the Fed “challenges the whole concept of freedom and liberty and sound money.” Thus Paul and other monetary reformers, though largely ignored by the mainstream media and political establishment, have made it clear that change must start with what really lies at the bottom of elite control: how money is made and who makes it.

Unfortunately, few progressive economists, including Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, and Robert Reich comprehend the monetary causes of today’s disasters. Instead of demanding reforms that would make money the proper servant of a sustainable economy, most call for more stimulus spending; i.e., more government debt, along with “reform” of a financial system that is corrupt down to its very DNA.

So do we really need the bankers’ fake currency, today backed by nothing but a federal deficit of $12 trillion and growing by the day?

Greco says we don’t, and this is what his book about. But it’s not about doing without the necessities of life, or heading for the hills with a gun and backpack. Nor is it about important efforts at macro-level monetary reform like those of the American Monetary Institute, Congressman Dennis Kucinich, or advocates for a basic income guarantee. Rather it’s about individuals, groups, and communities taking control of the monetary system at the grassroots level and creating an entirely new basis for trade than bank-owed debt.

Greco writes about “a new paradigm approach to the exchange function.” The solution, he says, “is to provide interest-free credit to producers within the process of mutual credit clearing. That is the process of offsetting purchases against sales within an association of merchants, manufacturers, and workers. It will eventually include everyone who buys and sells, or makes and receives disbursements of any kind.”

Greco is one of the world’s leading experts in describing alternative or complementary currencies. These are self-regulating systems that facilitate “reciprocal exchange,” not using government legal tender but which are still allowed under the currency laws so long as taxes are not evaded.

Greco discusses the large and growing worldwide “LETS” movement—Local Exchange Trading Systems, like the Ithaca HOURS system in Ithaca, New York. He describes the Swiss WIR Bank, the longest-running credit clearing system in the world, with over 70,000 members. He writes about the national and international barter exchanges that involve over 400,000 businesses trading at an annual level of $10 billion.

Greco also describes the world-famous Mondragon Cooperatives from the Basque region of Northern Spain. Started by a Roman Catholic priest in 1941, the Mondragon system, he says, is “the hub of what is probably the most successful and progressive social cooperative economy in modern history.”

He also tells the inspiring story of the Argentine trading clubs—the trueques—which, when used with “provincial bonds” issued by regional governments, rescued that country during the 2001 economic collapse brought on by the collusion between the Argentine government and the International Monetary Fund.

Credit clearing is not new. Greco traces it to the medieval European fairs. These exchanges are like banking clearing houses. The world’s largest is the automated clearing house—ACH—operated by the Federal Reserve.

But as Greco points out: “The clearing process need not be restricted to banks; it can be applied directly to transactions between buyers and sellers of goods and services. The LETS systems that have proliferated in communities around the world use the credit clearing process, as do commercial trade exchanges. Credit clearing systems are, in essence, clearing houses—but their members are businesses and individuals instead of banks.”

Alternative currency and trading systems, says Greco, are the wave of the future. Even though most only mount up to partial local successes, they show what can be done. Greco likens these efforts to the Wright Brothers’ first flight that covered 120 feet. They show, he says, that the potential exists for local, regional, then national and international money-free exchanges that eventually could be joined by a single web-based trading platform. This could eventually get rid of the corruption of debt-money altogether.

Chapter 16 of the book is about “A Regional Economic Development Plan Based on Credit Clearing” that shows the potential. Greco writes, “The credit clearing exchange is the key element that enables a community to develop a sustainable economy under local control and to maintain a high standard of living and quality of life.”

This would be a real revolution. What can governments do to help? Perhaps only by removing, as Greco recommends, the privileged position of bank debt-money as legal tender. Instead, let bank money compete with market-based alternative currencies and credit exchanges, if it can.

Greco’s book is a how-to-do-it manual that updates and expands on his previous books, Money and Debt: A Solution to the Global Crisis, New Money for Healthy Communities, and Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender. Greco also operates a website that offers advice and support to worthwhile community initiatives.

My own view is that no one should wait to see who takes the lead in creating the monetary and credit-clearing systems of the future. The time is now. There is no more reason to delay. If the people of the world do not join together in this kind of action, they can likely kiss their economic future and perhaps their livelihoods good-bye. The controllers of the world, those with the big money, the ones who run the banking systems, who own the global corporations, and who finance politicians like Obama, the Bushes, and the Clintons, are now poised in their blindness to extinguish the light of democracy on the planet for good.

Greco is implying that the power of the elite is not only dated but illusory. Thus the way to proceed is not just to oppose them. If they are opposed, they’ll do what they always do, which is to roll out the SWAT teams, the military in the streets, the tear gas, the sound cannon, the concentration camps, the Patriot Acts, the torture chambers, because that is all they know, and it’s what they do best.

The money monopoly translates into a monopoly on violence on an ascending scale. We know that the U.S. sells more weapons abroad than any other nation, and we know that it is war above all that makes the bankers rich.

So let them have their weapons and wars. With all due respect to those brave enough to protest, it’s time for people simply to walk away and set up their own economic and monetary systems as a prelude to a rebirth of humanity as ethical beings in sustainable communities of choice.

The keys, says Greco, are simple: “Promote the establishment of private complementary exchange systems—and use them. Buy from your friends and neighbors wherever possible. Contribute your time, energy, and money to whatever moves things in the right direction.”

Greco also recommends that the unit of exchange for alternative currencies be based on the value of commodities—not necessarily gold or silver, which bankers and governments manipulate, but those commodities readily available within a trading system. State and local governments should do everything possible to protect, encourage, nourish, and participate in these systems.

The irony is that what may appear on the surface to be technical changes in how the exchange of goods and services takes place can have such profound effects. The answer is that systems of exchange reflect entirely different perceptions of the world. Bank-money exchange reflects and creates a system of elite control and human slavery. Reciprocal credit exchange reflects and creates a democratic system on a level monetary playing field.

The difference points to the fact that such reform is, above all, a spiritual endeavor. Thomas Greco has devoted decades to this quest and is one of its foremost visionaries. In an Epilogue he writes: “We will either learn to put aside sectarian differences, to recognize all life as one life, to cooperate in sharing earth’s bounty, and yield control to a higher power—or we will find ourselves embroiled in ever-more destructive conflicts that will leave the planet in ruins and avail only the meanest form of existence for the few, if any, who survive.”

It’s a vision we can all strive to embrace.

Hinton’s book is a fascinating, absorbing and detailed account of land reform in a single Chinese village, Long Bow, near Changzhi in a liberated area in 1948 when land was turned over to the peasants. No less than the better known Red Star Over China, it is a classic of the revolution wrought by Mao’s Communist Party of China (CPC). The book is a very concrete, first person account. Hinton himself lived in the village of Long Bow in China at the time of land reform when the feudal estates were broken up and given to the peasants. Two of its characteristics make the book compelling. First the reader gets to know the participants, the peasants, by name and to witness their lives change forever as they take their destiny into their own hands for the first time in millennia. Second, the book begins by describing in detail what life was like before liberation. This writer is pretty much sob-resistant, but I wept several times as I read the condition of the peasants, ruthlessly exploited and degraded by the landowners in collaboration with the central government and the connivance of the Catholic “missionary” effort.

Hinton took over a thousand pages of notes and returned to the US only upon the termination of Truman’s widely despised war on Korea in 1953, which killed one million Asians and about 50,000 U.S. soldiers and contributed mightily to his defeat at the hands of Eisenhower. Hinton’s notes were promptly confiscated by customs and turned over to the notorious McCarthyite committee of Senator James Eastland. Hinton had his passport confiscated, was harassed by the FBI, blacklisted and unable to find work. He finally found land to farm which he did for a decade and a half. He finally got the release of his notes and set to work on Fanshen. No major publishing house would print it, but in 1966 Monthly Review Press, bless their Marxist souls, finally published it. In the splendid political climate of the 60s, it was a great but short lived success.

One especially stirring moment in Hinton’s account arrives when the landlords, deprived of any armed force to impose their will, take to threatening the peasants with the wrath of their ancestors. Standing before a monument to his ancestors, fearful and hesitant, one of the leading peasants finally takes a hammer to the headstone and smashes it to pieces. There is no thunderbolt from the skies, and at that moment the hold of the old exploiters was greatly weakened but not broken. The peasants remained afraid that Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and their army would win and the old landlords would return; and the influence of the Catholics and their support of the old ways remained. But the peasants encouraged by the CPC cadre pushed on (Of course the threat of the displeasure of an ancestor is pretty thin gruel compared to the fire and brimstone fear that the monotheistic desert religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, provided to the West.) Here Mao’s words found expression in the deeds of the peasants:

“What should we not fear? We should not fear heaven. We should not fear ghosts. We should not fear the dead. We should not fear the bureaucrats. We should not fear the militarists. We should not fear the capitalists.”

Pretty good advice –then and now.

During land reform in Long Bow, there was no presence of the People’s Liberation Army, just a few CPC cadre and in this case Hinton. More often than not the cadre had to restrain the peasants from killing the landlords at once and often in fairly merciless ways – and the cadre were not always successful. Millenia of rage at the beatings, rapes, theft, death of loved ones and worst human degradation imaginable poured out at the rulers of old China in those days. But revolution is not a matter of serving tea, as Mao put it.

I recently returned from a short stay in China. Without Hinton’s book, an adequate perspective on what I saw would have been impossible. New China is impressive in many respects, but it arose on the ashes of old China and the suffering endured for millennia by the Chinese peasantry until the end of Chiang Kai-shek’s U.S. backed rule. In Hinton’s book Mao makes no appearance nor do other giants of the Chinese revolution, but we see the fruits of their work up close. Chairman Mao liked to say that to understand society one should look down, not up; and Fanshen does just that. Look down not up – pretty good advice and so little regarded on the contemporary “left” which is so much given to watching those on high.

While the European events of WWII may play a big role with a Jewish population they are not as significant to many others, especially most Muslims. Why should they be? These events only affected some Muslims with the creation of Israel. America backed U.N. Resolution 181 primarily because of the events in Europe during the war. If the U.S. had really believed in democracy they would have supported Palestine being returned to the Arabs at the end of the British Mandate. After all Britain had previously supported Arab independence with the McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1915, two years before the Balfour Declaration was issued. England and France eventually said, “No” to both the Arabs and Jews with the Sykes-Picot Treaty and divvied up the spoils of the former Ottoman Empire between themselves.

Shortly after the Balfour Declaration President Wilson rightly observed on July 4, 1918,

The settlement of every question, whether of territory, of sovereignty, of economic arrangement, or political relationship, rests upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned, and not upon the basis of the material interest or advantage of any other nation or people which may desire a different settlement for the sake of its own exterior influence or mastery. If that principle is to rule, and so the wishes of Palestine’s population are to be decisive as to what is to be done with Palestine, then it is to be remembered that the non-Jewish population of Palestine – nearly nine-tenths of the whole – are emphatically against the entire Zionist program. The tables show that there was no one thing upon which the population of Palestine was more agreed upon than this. To subject a people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration, and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle just quoted, and of the People’s rights, though it is kept within the forms of law.¹

Twenty-nine years later and another world war under our belt, the U.S. sang another tune. Truman pragmatically observed when questioned regarding his overruling a report by the State Department advocating against the creation of Israel, “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”² This support from the Truman Administration was borne out of guilt and political expedience. It is notable that Truman refrained from championing having all those displaced Jews sent to New York instead of Palestine.

Sixty-two years after the creation of Israel the west is still consistently battered with images of WWII by Israelis and Jews as some type of bastardized excuse for nearly any type of crime or aberrant behavior they might be guilty of. In July 2009 New Jersey resident Ben-Ami Kaddish pled guilty to spying for Israel. The top secret documents he sent were far more extensive and damaging than those Jonathan Pollard, another Jewish spy handed over to Israel. For sixty seconds the media had a field day playing the holocaust card and whining that M.R. Kaddish was too old to stand trial and that the events occurred years ago. Kaddish was eventually convicted of a single offense and sentenced to pay a $50,000 dollar fine. Kaddish’s reply when Judge Pauley passed sentence, “No problem.”³ Obviously spying for Israel pays well.

The media along with Representative Jane Harman and the usual suspects, AIPAC and ADL were also very instrumental in getting the trials of AIPAC spies, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman derailed. Oddly enough the federal official who was not Jewish and involved in passing information to Rosen and Weissman is presently doing hard time for his part of the crime.

In September, Toronto journalist and author, Naomi Klein and a group of artists signed a letter calling the Toronto Film Festival on the carpet for celebrating Israeli filmmakers. Klein likened the recognition as the same as celebrating California wine during the 1960’s grape boycott or South Africa during its apartheid history. She and the other signers were instantly labeled anti-Semites and self-hating Jews. Some went as far as offering absurd rationalizations how Klein could be Jewish and an anti-Semite too. This was no doubt why activist Jane Fonda backed down faster than a turkey tossed from a 747 when confronted by this monolithic lobby.

Most recently holocaust politics has played a big role in the Roman Polanski case. Polanski, who was convicted of drugging and having unlawful sex with a minor, has been a fugitive from American justice for 31 years. The Los Angeles Times ran two articles and an editorial on Polanski in their October 1, 2009 edition. When was the last time a movie director warranted three pieces in a single issue, none dealing with his latest hit film? All three articles invoked the holocaust as some excuse for not sentencing Polanski. One piece even went as far as to mention the fact that the director was arrested on Rosh Hashanah. As if the Swiss police were lying in wait for Polanski like nefarious Nazis to capture him on a Jewish holiday. According to this line of thinking then any Catholic pedophile should be given a pass on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.

Regarding Polanski’s arrest, Peg Yorkin was quoted, “My personal thoughts are let the guy go. It’s bad a person was raped. But that was so many years ago. The guy has been through so much in his life. It’s crazy to arrest him now. Let it go. The government could spend its money on other things.” It is highly doubtful Ms. Yorkin would be expounding such ideas if it was her 13 year old daughter who was drugged and sodomized. The fact that a woman would defend Polanski only serves to demonstrate how warped the thinking is of those practitioners of holocaust politics. Bringing the events of WWII in as some jaundiced defense for Polanski also smacks of gross elitism. The thinking is that what happened to Polanski’s mother being sent off to a camp is so traumatic it would be cruel and unusual punishment to send him to prison. Guess what, prison is supposed to be punishment for committing a crime, especially one as socially unacceptable as pedophilia. The logical end to this type of thinking would be to give all Chinese-American rapists a pass since over 6 million Chinese civilians were slaughtered by the Japanese during WWII.⁴ The most time Polanski can ever do is 16 months. That is less than two years for brutally stealing a young girl’s childhood.

This use of holocaust politics allowing Israel to summarily dismiss the Goldstone Report and rationalize that Ben-Ami Kaddish is too old to prosecute only makes the argument that Jews considered themselves above the law, specifically because of events which occurred 70 years ago in Europe. Of course there are those exceptions, Bernie Madoff who stole primarily from Jews, and certainly wasn’t a beneficiary of holocaust politics is now doing time. It does beg the question that if Polanski’s case is so ancient that the Los Angeles D.A. shouldn’t bother with it, then an explanation is certainly due as to why so much of the government’s time and money was spent seeing that alleged Nazi guard, John Demjanjuk was deported for a crime that he already served time for and was found not guilty of by an Israeli court.

Debra Winger is on record saying, “The whole art world suffers from such arrests [Polanski’s].”⁵ Hollywood and the media continue to bellyache about Mel Gibson’s 2006 DUI arrest and he didn’t touch a person, let alone a young girl. Where is Winger’s support for an artist like Mr. Gibson? When the cast of Seinfeld recently reunited the media was conspicuously silent about Michael Richards’ racial invective against African-Americans at a comedy club in 2006.⁶ Obviously Mr. Richards’ crime was old news and wasn’t worth bringing up.

Accountability is something all countries and persons should face for their actions. No one should be above their country’s laws. No country should be above international law. Considering Israel’s recent war crimes and the fact they are chomping at the bit to bomb Iran, the dropped cases against AIPAC spies and the excusing of a convicted pedophile it should give one pause to wonder if the consistent use of holocaust politics has created a chosen group that is above criminal prosecution and accountability for their crimes.

1. President Woodrow Wilson speech on Independence Day July 4, 1918, text in Tannous, Izzat. 1988. The Palestinians: Eyewitness History of Palestine Under British Mandate. I.G.T. Company, New York, p. 72.
2. ”Harry Truman,” Wikipedia; also quoted in “Anti-Zionism,” ed. by Teikener, Abed Rabbo & Mezvinsky; also in Cape Cod Times “The Sorrow of Truman,” Sean Gonsalves, Nov. 28, 2000.
3. New York Times, “Man 85 Avoids Jail Time for Giving Military Secrets,” Benjamin Weiser, May 29, 2009.
4. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust, Iris Chang,
5. ”Euro outrage over Polanski arrest,” Variety.
6. It is a public record that Michael Richards committed the act mentioned in the article. YouTube videos of the occurrence were the first to break it. It was also covered on Huffington Post at the time.

   The significance of the Zionist mission,
   Israel as a Jewish state, and
   Israel not being responsible for the Palestinian displaced persons.

All of these issues, which had roles in establishing the Israel state, are expressed with sweeping generalities, devoid of specifics and facts. Obfuscation, lack of clarity and an assumption that what is being related is correct often characterize discussions of these issues. No questions asked and nothing to explain.

Evidence contradicts the narratives that Israel’s supporters work diligently to create. Deconstructing the spurious Israeli narratives is an essential before constructing a base for Middle East peace.

The Zionist Mission

The Zionists portray themselves as a vanguard of Jewish thought and aspiration, leading the masses of Jewish people to freedom and fulfilling the promises denied to them by an adversarial world. History contradicts these portrayals, especially that of Zionism as a mass movement by the Jewish people. Zionist philosophy had little appeal to the Jewish people in the late 19th century.

The first Zionist Congress (1887) was to have taken place in Munich, Germany. However, due to considerable opposition by the local community leadership, both Orthodox and Reform, it was decided to transfer the proceedings to Basle, Switzerland.

Reform Judaism in a series of proclamations, which culminated in the 1885 Pittsburgh Conference, rejected the Zionist program (Note: Overturned in 1999 by contemporary Reform Judaism):

“We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community; and we therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning a Jewish state.”

The 19th century emancipation movements liberated West and Middle European Jews and permitted them to integrate into European society.

“Jews emerged as writers of secular literature, enriching English, French, and German literature with novels, short stories, poems, and essays. In Britain, Benjamin Disraeli, who converted to Christianity, wrote popular novels before becoming prime minister. Heinrich Heine, who converted to Christianity in order to earn a law degree in Germany, became one of the best-loved German poets.”

The Zionist agenda evidently preferred Disraeli to remain Jewish and not become Britain’s Prime Minister. Jews rejected this agenda, which they perceived as prompting nations to question the loyalty of their Jewish citizens, as serving to impede their advances, and as reinforcing a race-baiting theory that Jews engaged in international conspiracies. Anti-Zionist Rabbis insisted: “Zion exists everywhere but in Zion.”

Examine the Russian Jews. They had significantly more problems than other European Jews. Nevertheless, they didn’t consider Zionism as a relief for their difficulties. Between 1881 and 1914, 2.5 million Jews migrated from Russia—1.7 million to America, 500,000 to Western Europe, and almost 300,000 to other nations. Until 1914, only a mere 30,000 – 50,000 Russian Jews followed the Zionist call to Palestine and 15,000 of them eventually returned to Russia.

So, if not for Zionism, how did the Israel state arrive and swell into millions of inhabitants?

By 1914, Zionism had become a stagnant adventure. Somehow, and in some way, someone took advantage of the Allies victory in World War I to promote the Balfour Declaration, which approved “a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.” The League of Nations’ certification of the British mandate in Palestine prevented the formation of a national Palestinian governing body and many English speaking European Jews came to work in the British administration Fly below the cloud of propaganda and rhetoric and the principal result of the original Zionist agenda is easily observed: People of uncertain circumstance (not dedicated Zionists) and favored by the Zionists have been transferred from their countries to a new land, while people of more certain circumstances and not favored by the Zionists have been displaced from their lands. The less favored have become refugees and, in many cases, been reduced to poverty.

The Jews who immigrated to Israel immediately after 1948 arrived for mainly economic and political reasons and not to fulfill a Zionist mission. Israel even claims the massive number of immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East (Mizrahi) did not arrive voluntarily, but were forced out of their homes. Zionism has not persuaded a great number of Jews to leave their western nations, not deterred them from greatly participating in their nations’ economic and social gains and not prevented them from integrating themselves into their nations’ cultures. The Economist (Jan. 11, 2007) mentions that only 17% of American Jews regard themselves as pro-Zionist and only 57% say that “caring about Israel is a very important part of being Jewish.”

In the last decades, Russians from the former Soviet Union, most of whom preferred to migrate to the United States, have been the principal immigrants to Israel. Many of them are dubious Jews or lost their Jewish roots during the Communist era. Orthodox Jews, who came for religious reasons and not to join their secular compatriots in common pursuits, are the fastest growing segment of the Israeli Jewish population. Where they settle, the secular Jews tend to leave. More aligned with Rabbis preaching mystical nineteenth century philosophies, these orthodox Jews isolate themselves from their fellow Israelis and from worldwide Jewry.

The dubious Zionists created a dubious Jewish state.

The Jewish State

By what authority did Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proclaim, “The Palestinians must recognize Israel as the state of the Jewish people,” and “Jerusalem is the united capital of the State of Israel and the Jewish people?”

The Jewish people don’t have a central authority and no referendum of its 15 millions has been taken. PM Netanyahu might not care, but many Jews fear that their fellow citizens might one day ask: “You have a country, what are you doing here?” or suggest that Jews are more loyal to a foreign nation and are working for that nation.

It is difficult to characterize Israel as a Jewish nation. Avraham Burg, former Knesset speaker and former head of the Jewish Agency has been quoted as saying, “to define the State of Israel as a Jewish state is the key to its end.” The term ‘Jewish nation’ has never been adequately defined and there is nothing exceptional in Israel that identifies a specific Jewish morality, culture or Judaic atmosphere

The cool and breezy manner in which the Israelis express the words ‘Jewish state’ intends to create a comfortable feeling; nothing hostile towards anyone, just a satisfactory note to Jewish citizens. Cause for alarm is abundant. Israel has no written constitution. Its laws discriminate against its minorities and separate its citizens.

   (1) The entire Jewish population left Nazareth many years ago and established a new Nazareth. The new Nazareth receives substantial benefits from the government and has grown prosperous and modern. The old Arab Nazareth remains old.
   (2) In Haifa, the Arab population lives by the sea. The Jewish population lives in the hills.
   (3) Few Palestinians have been able to rent housing or buy property in West Jerusalem.
   (4) In Acre, immigrant Jews are able to acquire property but are not allowed to sell the property to Arab citizens.
   (5) Tel Aviv has contiguous populations but not mixed populations.
   (6) Few, if any Arabs, have been able to purchase government sponsored housing.
   (7) The separation of populations results in the separation of activities, recreation centers, schools and education.
   (8) Although some Arabs are able to obtain college scholarships, the large majority of college scholarships require previous military duty. Since Arabs are not allowed to serve in the Israeli army, few Arabs can obtain college scholarships.
   (9) Arabs don’t obtain many housing loans.
   (10) The state of Israel owns more than 90 percent of the land. Non-Jewish citizens cannot, except in rare occasions, purchase land.
   (11) Whenever the Israeli army wants to construct a military base, Arab property is expropriated for the endeavor.
   (12) Since marriages are performed by a rabbi, a Jew cannot marry a non-Jew within the boundaries of Israel.

Separation of ethnicities is most apparent in how Israel and most of the world differ in regarding nationality. It’s not just separation. It’s a de facto apartheid, which the words ‘Jewish state’ will tend to reinforce.

All Americans have both United States citizenship and nationality. Israelis have Israel citizenship, but don’t have an Israel nationality. Israel’s citizens have either Jewish, Arab, Druze, Samaritan, Circassian, Kara’ite or foreign nationality. Jewish nationals already have overwhelming preference in the Israeli state, Defining Israel as a Jewish state seems ominous; only an attempt to give some meaning to the preference, and reinforce it to an extent that being non-Jewish means you might as well leave

Add to the dangerous mix of laws, which favor the favored nationals, the declarations of Israel’s leaders. According to the Jewish Daily Forward (March 18, 2009): “Foreign Secretary Avigdor Lieberman was elected to the Knesset on a platform that would require a loyalty oath as a condition of Israeli citizenship. He has suggested transferring Israeli-Arab population centers to the control of a future Palestinian state.”

Israel today is a nation whose people have conditions, problems, purposes and values that are different from Jews around the world. The Israeli characteristics aren’t derivatives of a three thousand year-old part urban and part tribal society – but are associated with a specific 21st century industrial society. The specifics create an Israeli identity that is not aligned with the identities of Jews in other nations. Israel is attempting to make all Jews into good Israelis and redefine the meaning of being Jewish. This includes being agreeable to Fundamentalist Christianity, which is not agreeable to world Jewry, but is Israel’s best friend. Israel is strengthening a fervent antagonist of Jewish and progressive peoples.

Recall the conclusion of the King-Crane commission, which was appointed by President Wilson in 1919:

…a national home for the Jewish people is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission’s conference with Jewish representatives that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase.

In view of all these considerations, and with a deep sense of sympathy for the Jewish cause, the Commissioners feel bound to recommend that only a greatly reduced Zionist program be attempted by the Peace Conference, and even that, only very gradually initiated. This would have to mean that Jewish immigration should be definitely limited, and that the project for making Palestine distinctly a Jewish commonwealth should be given up.

Israelis also make it seem that the route to the ‘Jewish state’ was a natural progression; disregarding their roles in creating the Palestinian displaced persons and the evictions of almost one million Palestinians from their lands.

The Displaced Persons

Israel did not permit Palestinians who left or were evicted during the 1948 and 1967 conflagrations to return to their homes and lands. Assets, businesses, property and household items were confiscated and the owners were not reimbursed. Israeli historian Benny Morris summarized the evictions well:

I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which truly underwent a hard tragedy. I feel sympathy for the refugees themselves. But if the desire to establish a Jewish state here is legitimate, there was no other choice. It was impossible to leave a large fifth column in the country. From the moment the Yishuv was attacked by the Palestinians and afterward by the Arab states, there was no choice but to expel the Palestinian population. To uproot it in the course of war.

Benny Morris used the correct phrase: “… if the desire to establish a Jewish state here is legitimate…” It was not legitimate. The choice was not between “having a Jewish state and not dispossessing the Palestinians.” The choice was between “not having the expanded state that Israel gained” and “dispossessing the Palestinians.” Almost all the evicted Palestinians were in the territory granted to the Palestinians. Not since the days of American expansionism has a group of individuals (Israel was not even a declared nation when the confiscations began nor had Arab armies attacked at that time.) invaded another land, seized the territory and cleared the area of the indigenous people.

Can anyone believe that Israel is not directly responsible for the Palestinian exodus? Did these people voluntarily decide to leave their homes, face starvation, have entire families commit suicide because of their desperation and then be willing to sit quietly in refugee camps? Are these verified reports of forced removals, terrorizing killings and destruction of more than 400 Palestinian villages only stories? Why were the villages destroyed? Why weren’t the villagers allowed to return? Why were vacant homes instantly occupied? In Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and elsewhere, the western nations were firm in demanding prompt return of refugees and fought to achieve that demand. In other situations, refugees had been created, but wanton property and asset seizures were not a rule. In Palestine, Israel seized all properties and assets and allowed newly arrived foreigners to occupy vacant homes. No precedent for these illegal operations exists in the post World War II western civilized world. We have perpetrators telling victims; “Look it’s over, let’s forget it. You want restitution; it isn’t going to happen.”

Israel has revealed its nature; a nation built on actions normally termed war crimes by world institutions; a nation that does not follow international law; and a nation that does not heed United Nations Resolutions. Distracting and deceiving the world community with contrived and fallacious narratives permits Israel to continue its illegal maneuvers. Setting the record straight will straighten the road to Middle East peace.

New Unionism: The union movement is the largest democratic force in the world today, by far. However, too many union members complain about bureaucratic behaviour at leadership level. Do you accept this is a problem, and, if so, what do you think are the root causes?

Dan Gallin: First, let’s get the problem in perspective. The level of bureaucracy in unions is constantly overstated. We have much less difficulty in this area than corporations do, for instance. Of course corporations are, by their very nature, top-down power structures – what could be less democratic than your average workplace? – and I cannot imagine anything as wasteful as some management bureaucracies. Similarly, think about bureaucracy in government, or in tri-partite bodies, or in non-governmental organisations. The difference is that unions, by their very structure and purpose, are consciously committed to internal democracy, and so failures are clearly seen as such. The basic structures of unionism are democratic and the internal struggle to assert and reassert democracy is always there. Trade unions have to deliver; there is a very short time span between demand and the delivery. Think of collective bargaining, for instance. Unions are constantly being held to account by their members.

NU: Are you trying to tell us there’s no real problem, then?

DG: No. I am not trying to minimize the problem. What I am saying is that bureaucracy is a pervasive feature of all institutional and organizational life. What, after all, is a bureaucracy? It is an administration, and all organizations need an administration. The problem arises when this administration develops a collective interest of its own, separate and eventually even opposed to the interests of the people it is supposed to serve.

This is serious enough in government, where the civil service constitutes a bureaucracy that can easily overreach its authority. In a democracy, the civil service is supposed to be the servant of the people. When it starts to act as its master, democracy is in danger.

In the trade union movement, the problem is even more serious because its administration, its own civil service if you wish, must represent people who have no other source of power than their organization. If this organization ceases to be responsive to their needs, they lose everything. An administration that builds its own power at the expense of the membership is betraying its trust – that is treason.

NU: If, as you say, trade unionism is inherently democratic, why is it that we hear these complaints about unions being run as dictatorships and/or oligarchies?

DG: Actually, there are not so many cases of this, in proportion. What happens is that we have some spectacular examples of organizations which degenerate and then become notorious. They are falsely represented as typical of the movement, most often in anti-union propaganda. But there is never any guarantee against an organization, even with the best democratic traditions, being hijacked by anti-democratic cliques or personalities.

The hijacking of the Russian revolution by the Communist bureaucracy led by Stalin is a classical example. After four or five short years, a vibrant, radically democratic, revolutionary mass movement started giving way to the rule of a bureaucracy which first asserted, then consolidated power by means of terror, police and military terror against its own people, on a scale not seen before in modern times. A whole new society with a bureaucratic ruling class!

How do these things happen? In order to work, democracy needs the active support of large masses of people at all times. In a union, this means the active participation of most of the membership. Democracy is not a state of being, it is an activity, it is in fact hard work, and it is a constant work in progress. You might say the same thing about freedom.

Most people are not able to maintain a high level of commitment over time. They are not organization professionals, they need to get on with their lives, as they should, so “democracy fatigue” might set in; especially after periods of great social stress. They might not pay attention to what happens in the organization for a time, routine sets in and the professionals take over. If the leaders are not trained in the right kind of politics, if they are not persons of the highest individual integrity, and if they are not supervised and controlled, they may start treating the organization as if it were their own property.

This is why it is the responsibility of every progressive and democratic trade union leadership to maintain constitutional and practical conditions in which membership participation and control is ensured and welcomed, without making conditions of participation too onerous for ordinary members.

NU: Just by way of clarification, can you explain what you mean by “trained in the right kind of politics”?

DG: Socialist politics, of course. And by that I mean the kind of politics based on the values that were at the origins of the labour movement and that made it great: solidarity, selflessness, respect for people, a sense of honour, and the modesty that comes with the awareness of being a soldier in the service of a great cause, a contempt for self-promotion, or “le refus de parvenir” as Monatte¹ called it.

NU: Do you think the Cold War contributed to bureaucratizing the movement?

DG: It certainly did. In a situation of extreme political polarization by outside forces, it is easy to lose sight of the original purpose of the exercise.

First, let us be clear what we are talking about. The Cold War was a conflict between States, between two blocs of States, led by the two superpowers of the time: the United States and the USSR, more or less from 1949 to 1989.

However, this conflict had nothing to do with a much older conflict within the labour movement. This earlier conflict arose after the October Revolution, when the Russian Communist Party created an International of its own and declared war on all other movements of the Left unless they accepted total subordination to its dictates.² That conflict became unbridgeable once the Communist leadership had moved to imprison and execute activists of other Left tendencies in the territory under its control, including its own opponents and dissidents. Under Stalin, this became a systematic campaign of extermination, with hit men spreading out all over the world to assassinate opponents.

It is small wonder that a majority of the Left, of all tendencies, became “anti-Communist”, meaning that they organized to defend themselves as best as they could against Communist claims of hegemony and terror.

When Nazi Germany attacked the USSR in 1941, breaking the treaty it had signed two years previously, the USSR found itself part of the anti-fascist war-time alliance. Despite past history and experience, much of the Western trade-union movement, which was predominantly social-democratic, was ready for organizational unity with Soviet bloc labour organizations. The result was the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU), which was founded in 1945. However, it lasted only four years as an inclusive organization of the world’s labour movement (though it continued, and still exists, as a Communist rump).

The unity on which the WFTU had been founded was the temporary unity of governments, not a unity of labour – none of the contentious issues between the Communists and everyone else on the Left had been resolved. When the unity of governments gave way to the rivalry between the US and the USSR for world power, the artificial top-down unity of the WFTU also broke apart.

What happened then was a race between the two blocs to secure the support – in fact, the control – of civil society organizations (labour, youth, students, women, etc.), with trade unions as prime targets.

And now comes the complicated part, which must be clearly understood. The Western governments and the non-Communist Left suddenly had the same enemy. The conflict between governments – the “Cold War” – and that earlier conflict within the labour movement, became superimposed. For some, they became indistinguishable.

This is how the war-time relationships which some socialists – and others – had formed with the political services of the US or UK governments (among others) to fight the Nazis continued seamlessly into the fight for a “free world”, against the new totalitarian menace.

In reality, we were of course still dealing with two different conflicts and two distinct interests. One was fighting Stalinism to defend working class interests, the other was fighting the USSR as a rival imperialism to that of the US. These are hardly compatible positions, but the most difficult thing to comprehend in politics, especially if you have the knife at your throat, is that the enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend!

Despite the apparent symmetry of the situation of the trade union movement within the two blocs, the reality was quite different. In the Soviet bloc, the trade union apparatus was part of the government structures of a police state, and a fairly subordinate structure at that. Dissidence was treated as a criminal offence or as a mental disorder. So in that context, the bureaucracy issue does not even arise in connection with the Cold War — the whole system had been thoroughly bureaucratized long before. In its first decades, that system was impossible to crack from within.

The situation in the West was much different: here a three-way battle was being fought between the advocates of an alignment on pro-American policies, the advocates and apologists for Soviet policies, and those who kept saying that neither option represented working class interests and that the labour movement should refuse to be aligned with either side.

Those of us who held the latter position believed that the lines of cleavage that mattered most in the world were not the vertical ones separating the two blocs, but the horizontal ones between the working class and the rulers of both systems, a fundamental division cutting across both blocs.

This was not an easy position to hold. The pressures to align and to conform were very strong. Having been put in charge of the AFL-CIO’s International Department by George Meany,³ Jay Lovestone⁴) — the Dr. Strangelove⁵ of the labour movement — with his acolyte Irving Brown⁶ and the various AFL-CIO Institutes, were running around the world buying unions with US government money, in close cooperation with the CIA , and trying to destroy any organization or individuals that did not accept their line, whether Communist or not. They were not looking for allies, they were recruiting agents.

The Soviet bloc operators were doing the same for the other side, also backed by considerable diplomatic and financial resources. The result of this competition is not difficult to guess: it spread a culture of corruption, especially in Africa where the movement was weakest and most vulnerable, but also in parts of Asia, Latin America, Europe and the United States itself, where some labour leaders were co-opted into Cold War politics, although most had no idea what the International Department was up to, and did not much care until all these operations were exposed in the mid-1960s.

In that sense the Cold War was a very powerful factor of bureaucratization in the West: it created and strengthened corrupt leaderships who no longer had to take their memberships into account, it enforced political conformity, stifled discussion, suppressed dissent and isolated all radical opposition through ‘red baiting’.

NU: Some labour writers contend that the acceptance of Cold War politics, and anti-Communist purges by the leadership of the American labour movement, contributed to its paralysis during the conservative onslaught of recent years.

DG: Yes and no. It’s not that simple. True enough, after the anti-Communist purges in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the merger with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) in 1955, the conservative elements of the AFL prevailed in the merged AFL-CIO. These people would later prove totally at a loss in the face of globalization and the conservative onslaught launched by Reagan, and continued by his successors, both Republican and Democrat.

But the problem with this story is that it exonerates the American Communist Party of any responsibility in these developments. The CP and its trade union activists are cast in the role of innocent victims. This overlooks the war the CP waged against all of the Left from its earliest days: first against the IWW and the socialists, then against the Trotskyists and against every other kind of radical group it didn’t control, and of course against most union leaderships, progressive or not. The CP did what it could to destroy the American Left and, like in Niemöller’s poem,⁷ when they came to get it there was nobody left to defend it.

This said, most conservative labour leaders didn’t need the Cold War in order to be ferociously anti-radical, super-patriotic and, eventually, helpless before the anti-labour campaigns of the Right. You have to remember that we’re dealing here with very stupid people. They may have been street-wise and cunning, but they knew nothing about the world and couldn’t think strategically. The roots of conservatism in the American union movement are very perceptively described by authors such as Daniel Fusfeld and Patricia Cayo Sexton.⁸) What the Cold War situation did, was to give people like Lovestone the opportunity to organize the right-wing of the American trade union bureaucracy as a base for a major international operation, and to isolate leaders of the labour Left, like Walter Reuther,⁹ Ralph Helstein¹⁰ and Pat Gorman,¹¹ as well as some good unions with a Communist history, like the ILWU and the UE.

NU: Did the Communists not at least denounce the clandestine right-wing operations the American unions were involved in?

DG: Not at all. Of course they would denounce operations like the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala, or of Goulart in Brazil, as examples of American imperialism in action, but there was never any exposure of the union involvement. The CIA and British government operations in the labour movement were blown open by Trotskyists and independent radicals in the mid-1960s. Then the New York Times picked up the story and it became a major scandal. But the CP had nothing to do with it at any stage. Afterwards, of course, everyone started writing about it.

NU: While all of this was happening in the US, bureaucratization must surely have been a growing problem in the European trade union movement as well?

DG: In Europe and elsewhere, for instance in Japan, the polarized politics of the Cold War also enforced political conformity and stifled dissent, but Europe is a complicated place with many political and trade union cultures, so generalizations are not very useful. In some countries Cold War politics played a major role in the labour movement, in others hardly at all.

Far more pervasive and general were the consequences of the war. Today it is hard to imagine the extent to which the historical labour movement had been destroyed, first by the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, then by the war itself, with the occupation of most of Europe by the Nazi armies and police. In most of Europe, the structures of the labour movement were wiped out, parties and unions of course, but also the entire institutional network that rooted the movement in society: welfare institutions, credit unions, co-ops, cultural and leisure time activities – everything.

Most of the leadership of the movement, right down to local level, had to go into exile, or into concentration camps, or died in the war. Many of the best people were lost. One of the important parties of the Socialist International, the Jewish Labour Bund,¹² was destroyed entirely, together with the population that supported it. No one had imagined anything like this could happen, and those who had hoped that the end of WWII would usher in another period of social revolution, a re-play of 1918, had lost touch with reality.

Superficially, the unions emerged in a strong position – after all we were on the side of the victors, whereas big business had collaborated with fascism throughout Europe and had much to be forgiven for. In fact, labour was far weaker than it appeared, and far more dependent on the State than before the war. That too did not seem to be a problem at first, since most post-war governments were pro-labour in one way or another, but it did eventually lead to the loss of the political and material independence of the movement and, yes, it did promote bureaucratization.

Whereas the pre-war movement conceived of itself as a counter-culture and an alternative society, at least in principle, the post-war movement made its peace with the “social market economy” and demanded no more than a better life within the system (full employment, welfare, social protection, good wages and working conditions).

In that situation, the leadership of the movement became increasingly unwilling to maintain a whole network of flanking institutions. If you don’t want to change society then you don’t need to build an alternative counter-culture or an alternative economy. Think of all the money you can save. So the unions concentrated on their presumed “core business” – collective bargaining with “social partners” – the parties concentrated on elections, and the movement lost its roots in society, lost many of its think tanks and educational institutions, and lost its periphery, a sphere of influence and protection.

At the same time, you had the surge of prosperity in post-war Western Europe through the Marshall Plan. An exhausted working class, after the deprivation and the sufferings of the war, started to get its life back and became gradually more comfortable over the next thirty years. And why not? But as it played out, as a major political factor, it created a problem the movement couldn’t cope with, because it also coincided with the rise of media empires, with television, financed largely by advertising. Our movement was not ready to compete at that level. This is where we lost the communications war. We lost our press and any independent expressions of working class culture, with the long-term effect of losing the culture wars in the 1990s.

Many of the issues of the vanished civil society of labour eventually got taken over by others (feminists, environmentalists, human rights activists, etc.), but that’s another story.

Then, in countries like France, Italy and Greece, where the CP was dominant in the labour movement, the working class became hostage to Cold War politics and political positions, as well as labour alignments. They were frozen for about thirty or forty years. In some other countries, notably Germany, Cold War polarization also contributed to deadening the political debate and distorting trade union priorities.

Finally, European unions have become accustomed to State subsidies, in general for specific activities, such as education or participation in a host of official and quasi-official institutions and meetings. Today, in many countries, unions would be unable to function without the government subsidies they have become accustomed to.

So what do you get? A heavily bureaucratized and passive movement, initially led by survivors, then rapidly replaced by complacent and arrogant careerists who are happy to depend on the State. They administer the gains of past struggles but are unwilling to conduct any new ones, opposing any ideas they have not thought of themselves and believing that nothing must ever happen for the first time. That kind of leadership educates union members to be passive consumers of union services, not participants in struggle.

NU: You said before that, as far as Europe was concerned, generalizations were not very useful. Should we take that to include what you just said?

DG: You got me there. I think what I have tried to do is draw a common denominator, a composite picture which applies in general but not exactly in any one country. For example, in the Nordic countries, except for a short-lived split in Finland, the Cold War had hardly any impact at all. In Spain, where the labour movement emerged from a fascist regime only in the 1970s, rank-and-file democracy is a strongly-felt aspiration. All of Eastern Europe is a different situation again, and a very complicated situation, with many cross-currents. And of course there are always exceptions. There have been outstanding labour leaders like Otto Brenner,¹³ Wilhelm Gefeller¹⁴ in Germany, Jack Jones¹⁵ in Britain, André Renard¹⁶ in Belgium. So, one has to fine-tune every national situation. But some will recognize my descriptions and, as the saying goes, if the shoe fits, wear it.

Neither do I want to idealize the pre-war labour movement in Europe. There were too many entirely avoidable and disastrous defeats. The leading labour parties of Germany and Austria had armed militias ready to fight which were awaiting orders that never came. The French Popular Front government refused to support the Spanish Republicans in the civil war, who, had they won, would have changed the course of history. Not to speak of the catastrophic Communist policies, in Germany, in Spain, all over. One needs to reflect on these defeats and learn from them. But even so, the level of ambition in those days was higher.

NU: You were general secretary of the IUF for many years, and active in the international union movement. How does the international movement cope with the problem of bureaucratism?

DG: With difficulty. You have to realize that the international movement is yet another level removed from the rank-and-file: the actual members of international trade union organizations, in a statutory sense, are national unions, not individual workers, so the international organization will reflect to a very large extent the culture and practices of its affiliated unions, particularly the large affiliates.

So, structurally, it is almost inevitably bureaucratic. The politics of the leadership, basically the secretariat and the governing bodies, makes a big difference. You can have an organization with a deeply rooted culture of militancy and a democratic culture, which will do two things: first, ensure that democratic practices are respected and encouraged in the way it operates, within its own governing bodies, and, second, encourage democratic participation within its affiliates wherever it can, for example through its educational programs, in its publications, etc.

NU: And then you have the others…

DG: Indeed. Again, it is a question of politics, of how you interpret the situation and, consequently, how you evaluate the union response required. If you believe that “social partnership” is an accurate description of labour/management relations, and that social change occurs through conversations between political leaders and experts – “social dialogue” – then you will invest your resources and energies in a lobbying operation. The privileged counterparts in these conversations will be the bureaucrats of government organizations and of employers’ organizations. In meeting after meeting, you will be bargaining about words, and you will believe you have won a significant victory when you have changed a sentence in a statement. This can go on forever, and no one will ever know the difference. The workers who are members of such organizations don’t even know they exist.

NU: How can workers, at rank-and-file level, learn to tell the difference between useful and useless organizations? Where does usefulness become apparent?

DG: Very simple: workers certainly can tell the difference when they become involved in a conflict. When it comes to conflict, the differences are very quickly apparent. And whether our international sell-out artists like it or not, unions are about conflict. Either the international organization pulls out all stops and the saying “one for all, all for one”, (especially the second part) becomes a concrete reality, for as long as it takes, or else the international organization starts mediating instead of fighting, tries to minimize and kill the conflict, even sides with the employer just to be rid of the problem.

NU: How does this relate back to the issue of bureaucratism? Are you suggesting that bureaucracy and politics are related?

DG: They are, very much so. However, the relationship is not a mechanical one. For instance it would be simplistic and wrong to say that left-wing politics protects us against bureaucracy. If we are talking about the Communist tradition, the opposite is true, almost always, and this includes Maoism, which is actually an extreme form of Stalinism. People who come out of that school are often dangerous authoritarians. Even when they change their politics, they don’t necessarily change their methods.

And of course social-democracy has its own awesome bureaucratic traditions; even anarchist and syndicalist organizations, contrary to legend, can be run in extremely authoritarian and bureaucratic ways.

No, the only form of politics which is an effective antidote to bureaucratism is the kind of socialist politics that contains a strong element of radical democracy. This goes back to Marx himself, but despite appearances, this current was never dominant in the socialist movement. It surfaces from time to time, a person like Rosa Luxemburg would be fairly typical, there were others within the political families of the Left. Eugene Debs in the United States would be another example.

NU: That’s not a very broad political base. If that’s all we have, is the struggle against bureaucratism lost in advance?

DG: No, because in fact we have very much more. The politics of radical democracy respond to a very deep and fundamental need felt by workers. They keep coming back to this on their own, and they very often spontaneously develop democratic forms of organizing, of conducting struggles, of running their organizations. Rosa Luxemburg understood this. This aspiration is very strong. That is the basic reason why the labour movement has such a democratic culture, despite all the pressures to the contrary from the society that surrounds it… the “old shit”, as Marx called it.¹⁷

NU: Do you see workers’ desire for deeper forms of democracy extending from union HQ all the way down into the workplace?

DG: Yes, except I would put it the other way around, from the workplace – the “point of production”, as the IWW used to say – to union HQ. It has to start at the point of production. As I said, this is a very fundamental need of workers, and actually very often of people in general. Think of women’s movements or peasant’s movements – in all progressive mass movements there is this demand for transparency and accountability in the leadership.

The point is to nurture and strengthen the politics of radical democracy, the particular strand of socialist politics which I believe is the authentic Marxism, which insists that power, where it matters, always has to remain in the hands of the workers. Today this means almost all of society, since nearly everybody is part of the working class, whether they know it or not. To get there, you have to start from the bottom, the point of production, and then build democratic institutions, like democratic unions, impose democratic procedures at every level, democratize the decision-making mechanism in public administration. We don’t want to abolish bureaucracy if bureaucracy means administration, we all need administration and we want it to be honest, transparent and efficient, in our own organizations to start with, then in society at large. We want an administration built on our key values: justice and freedom. These will be the values of the society of the future – if we make it that far.

1. Pierre Monatte (1881-1960) A proofreader by profession, he was a leader of the French CGT when it was a revolutionary syndicalist organization and, in 1909, founded its journal, La vie Ouvrière. He was an anti-war internationalist during World War I., joined the French Communist Party in 1923 and was expelled in 1924 for opposing its bureaucratization. He then returned to revolutionary syndicalism, and in 1925 he founded La Révolution Prolétarienne, which is still being published. “Le refus de parvenir” means: “the refusal of social climbing”.
2. The Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920 agreed on ‘Twenty One Conditions‘, which formalised the beginning of ‘the great split’: a split which was to divide the labour movement for the rest of the century. Note in particular: ‘In the columns of the press, at public meetings, in the trades unions, in the co-operatives – wherever the members of the Communist International can gain admittance – it is necessary to brand not only the bourgeoisie but also its helpers, the reformists of every shade, systematically and pitilessly.’
3. George Meany (1894-1980), president of the American Federation of Labor from 1952 to 1955, then, following its merger with the Congress of Industrial Organizations, president of the united AFL-CIO from 1955 to 1979.
4. Jay Lovestone (1906-1989), a founder of the American Communist Party, later leader of the Right-Wing opposition group (the pro-Bukharin faction) which dissolved in 1941. In 1943 Lovestone became international affairs director of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union and, in 1963, director of the international affairs department of the AFL-CIO. He held that position until 1974 and as the main architect of the collaboration of the AFL-CIO with the CIA. For more on Lovestone, see: A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone, Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster by Ted Morgan (New York: Random House, 1999
5. Dr. Strangelove: the 1964 black comedy film by Stanley Kubrick, featuring a paranoiac American general launching a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, hoping to thwart a Communist conspiracy to “sap and impurify” the “precious bodily fluids” of the American people with fluoridated water. The US president in the film is advised by a “mad scientist” type: Dr. Strangelove.
6. Irving Brown (1911-1989) , chief lieutenant and hatchet man for Lovestone since the 1930s, set ujp”anti-Communist” operations in the trade union movement, mostly in Europe, including the notorious Mediterranean Committee, organized with the help of gangsters in French, Italian and Greek ports.
7. Friedrich Niemöller (1892-1984), prominent German anti-Nazi theologian and Lutheran pastor. He is best known as the author of the following lines (and variations thereof):
   “First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist; Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist;
   Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
   Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
   Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.”
   
8. Daniel Fusfeld: The Rise and Repression of Radical Labor 1877-1918, Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, Chicago, 1980 (ISBN 088286050X) and Patricia Cayo Sexton: The War on Labor and the Left – Understanding America’s Unique Conservatism, Westview Press, Boulder/San Francisco/Oxford, 1991 (ISBN 0813310636
9. Walter Reuther (1907-1970), leading organizer and after 1946 president of the United Auto Workers’ union, a Socialist Party member until 1939, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1952, negotiated the merger with the American Federation of Labor in 1955, eventually clashed with Meany over the conservative policies of the AFL-CIO and formed a short-lived alternative center, the Alliance for Labor Action (1958–1972) with the Teamsters and a few smaller unions. On May 9, 1970, Reuther and his wife May were killed when their chartered plane crashed while on final approach to the airstrip near the union’s recreational and educational facility at Black Lake, Michigan. In October 1968, a year and a half before the fatal crash, Reuther and his brother Victor were almost killed in a small private plane as it approached Dulles airport. Both incidents are amazingly similar; the altimeter in the fatal crash was believed to have malfunctioned. When Victor Reuther was interviewed many years after the fatal crash he said, “I and other family members are convinced that both the fatal crash and the near fatal one in 1968 were not accidental.”
10. Ralph Helstein (1908-1985), president of the United Pckinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) from 1946 to 1968. Under his leadership, the union, a CIO affiliate, became one of the most militant and democratic unions in the US. It organized the meat packing industry in the US and Canada and played a leading role in fighting for minority and women’s rights. When the UPWA merged with the Amalgamated Meat Cutters union in 1968, Helstein became vice president and special counsel. He worked with the union until 1972 and died in Chicago in 1985.
11. Patrick Emmet Gorman (1882-1980), a life-long socialist, International Secretary-Treasurer of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen (AFL) from 1942 to 1976 (the Meat Cutters were an old socialist union which had a European constitution, where the secretary-treasurer, not the president, was the chief executive officer). Gorman opposed Meany on the Vietnam war and on many other political issues.
12. The General Jewish Labour Union of Lithuania, Poland and Russia, in Yiddish the Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln un Rusland, generally called the Bund (from German: Bund, meaning federation or union) or the Jewish Labour Bund, was a Jewish political party and trade union in several European countries operating predominantly between the 1890s and the 1930s with remnants of the party still active in the United States, Canada, Australia, France and the United Kingdom. The Bund opposed Zionism and fought for the recognition of Jews as an autonomous cultural community within European countries. In this and in other respects, it was strongly influenced by the Austro-Marxist school of socialism, and was a left-socialist party in the context of the Labour and Socialist International. In WWII it was active in the resistance movement against the Nazi occupation in Poland and in Lithuania, one of its leaders, Marek Edelman, was a leader of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, and later of the Workers’ Defense Committee (KOR) in 1976 and of the Solidarity movement. Two leaders of the Bund, Victor Alter and Henryk Erlich, who had sought refuge in the USSR after the German invasion, were executed in December 1941 in Moscow on Stalin’s orders.
13. Otto Brenner (1907-1972), president of the German metal workers’ union IG Metall from 1956 to 1972. In 1931 Brenner left the Social-Democratic Party (SPD) which he had joined as a youth to join the Socialist Workers’ Party, founded by Left Socialists and dissident Communists, too late to prevent the seizure of power by Hitler. Brenner became active in the anti-Nazi resistance, was arrested in 1933, sentenced to two years’ prison and kept under police supervision until the end of the war. In 1945 Brenner re-joined the SPD and became active in the reconstruction of the trade union movement. At the head of the IG Metall he played a leading tole in the defense of democratic rights and against rearmament. In 1961, he was elected president of the International Metalworkers’ Federation.
14. Wilhelm Gefeller (1906-1983), president of the German chemical workers’ union IG Chemie from 1949 to 1969, one of the founders of the post-war German trade union movement, active in the SPD. Strong advocate of co-determination in German industry and at international level, and of democratic rights. President of the International Chemical and General Workers’ Unions (ICF) in the late 1960s.
15. James Larkin (Jack) Jones (1913-2009), general secretary of the Transport & General Workers’ Union (UK) from 1968 to 1978. Throughout his career he strove to increase the power and influence of shop stewards. In 1937 he joined the International Brigades in the Spanish civil war and was wounded in 1938. Jones was also Vice-President of the International Transport Workers Federation and, after his retirement, was a campaigner for pensioners’ rights. His autobiography, Union Man, was published in 1986.
16. André Renard (1911-1962), Belgian trade unionist, active in the resistance under Nazi occupation,created an illegal united trade union movement independent of political parties and advocated its extension to the entire country at liberation, but could not overcome the split between socialist and Catholic unions. Deputy General-Secretary of the socialist trade union center FGTB, leader of the six-week general strike in 1960-1961 against the austerity policies of the conservative government. A strong advocate for the autonomy of Wallonia (the French-speaking part of Belgium).
17. ”…revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the old shit and become fitted to found society anew.” Karl Marx: The German Ideology, Part I: Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook 1845.

A prisoner of war must not be left in captivity. A wounded soldier must not be left in the field. The state signs an unwritten contract with every person who joins the army, and most definitely with everyone who serves in a combat unit.

The behavior of the Israeli governments in these 1196 days, of the politicians and the generals who are responsible for this outrage, is a violation of this contract, a betrayal of trust. In short: an infamy. It enrages and infuriates every decent person, and not only combat soldiers.

The betrayal is already in the terminology used. In the words of the Book of Proverbs (18:21): “Death and life are in the power of the tongue”.

A soldier captured by the enemy in a military action is a prisoner of war – in every language, in every country.

Gilad Shalit was captured in a military action. He was an armed soldier in uniform. In this context, it does not matter whether the action itself was legal or illegal, and whether the captors were regular soldiers or guerrillas.

Gilad Shalit is a prisoner of war.

The denial started at the first moment. The Israeli government refused to call the capture by its proper name and insisted that it was an “abduction” or even “kidnapping”.

The disciplined Israeli media, marching behind the generals in lockstep like the Prussian guard, joined the chorus. Not a single newspaper, not a single radio or TV announcer ever spoke about the “prisoner of war”. All of them, almost without exception, from the first day on, spoke about the “abducted” or “kidnapped” soldier.

The words are important. All armies are familiar with exchanges of prisoners of war. Generally, this happens after the end of hostilities, sometimes while the war is still going on. The army releases the enemy fighters in return for the release of its own captured soldiers.

This does not apply to abducted persons. When criminals abduct a person and hold them for ransom, the question arises whether the price should be paid. Payment may encourage more abductions and reward the criminals.

The moment Gilad was defined as “abducted”, he was condemned to what followed.

He also lost his honor as a soldier. A soldier is not “abducted”. The millions of soldiers captured during World War II – Germans, Russians, Britons, Americans and all the others – would have felt insulted by any suggestion that they were “abducted”.

The greatest danger hovering over the head of Gilad since falling into captivity does not come from Hamas, but from our own army.

It was clear that, given an opportunity, the army would try to free him by force. That is deeply embedded in its basic ethos: Never give in to “abductors”.

If I were Gilad’s father and a praying man, I would pray every day: Please, dear God, don’t let the army find out where Gilad is being kept!

Our army commanders are prepared to expose prisoners to immense risks in order to free them by force, instead of exchanging them for Palestinian prisoners. For them it is a matter of honor.

In such an operation, the lives of the liberators are put at risk. But above all, it’s the life of the prisoner that is endangered.

One of the most celebrated operations in the annals of the Israeli Army took place in Entebbe in July, 1976. It freed the 98 passengers of a hijacked Air France plane, which had been forced to land at Entebbe airport in Uganda. The operation elicited worldwide admiration. Only one of the liberators lost his life – the brother of Binyamin Netanyahu.

In the ensuing intoxication of success, one fact was overlooked: in the daring operation, huge risks were taken. If even one detail of the complex action had gone wrong, it would have meant disaster for the abducted passengers. It could have ended in a bloodbath. Since it succeeded, nobody dared to raise questions.

The results of the operation to release the abducted athletes at the Munich Olympic games in 1972 were very different. When the German police, with the encouragement of the Golda Meir government, tried to free them by force, all the athletes lost their lives. Most of them were probably killed by bullets from the guns of the German policemen. How else to explain the fact that to this very day, the governments of Israel and Germany have both refused to release the post mortem results?

The same happened two years later when the Israeli army was ordered by Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan to free the 105 children who were being held by Palestinian commandos in the Northern Israeli town of Ma’alot. The action miscarried, and 22 children and 3 teachers lost their lives. In this instance, too, it seems that some – if not all – of them were killed by the bullets of the liberators. These post mortem reports also remain unpublished.

The same happened in 1994 when the army tried to free the “abducted” soldier Nachshon Waxman in the West Bank. The army had exact intelligence, the action was planned meticulously, something went wrong, and the prisoner was killed.

Lately it was learned that a senior officer had called on his soldiers to commit suicide rather than be captured. He has given orders to fire on the “abductors”, even when it means endangering the life of the captured soldier.

It may well be that one of the reasons for the prolongation of Gilad Shalit’s suffering lies in the hope of the army commanders to obtain intelligence about his whereabouts, so as to try to free him by force. It is no secret that the Gaza Strip is crawling with informers. The dozens of “targeted killings” and many of the actions of the “Molten Lead” operation would not have been possible without a dense network of collaborators, recruited during the long years of the occupation.

Incredibly – it borders on a miracle – the Israeli security service has been unable to fulfill this hope. It seems that Shalit’s captors are succeeding in maintaining rigorous secrecy. That, by the way, explains why his captors have adamantly refused to have him meet with the International Red Cross representatives and to convey letters by and to him, including parcels (that could well have contained sophisticated locating devices). That may have saved his life.

It can be assumed that the video that was conveyed yesterday by the German mediator, in exchange for the release of 21 female Palestinian prisoners, was meticulously prepared so as to prevent any possibility of identifying the place where he is being kept.

This affair also shows the absolute superiority of the Israeli propaganda machine over all competitors – if there are any.

The world media have adopted, almost without exception, the Israeli terminology. All over the world, they talk about the “abducted” Israeli soldier, rather than about a prisoner of war. British or German newspapers which use this word would not dream of applying it to one of their own soldiers in Afghanistan.

The name of Gilad Shalit was mouthed by the world’s leaders as if he were, at the very least, one of them. Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel spoke about him freely, certain that the listeners at home knew who he was. Liberating the “abducted Israeli soldier” has become a declared aim of several governments.

This formulation is by itself a triumph for Israeli propaganda. The negotiations are about an exchange of prisoners between Israel and Hamas, with German and/or Egyptian mediation. An exchange of prisoners has two sides – Shalit on the one side, Palestinian prisoners on the other. But throughout the world, as in Israel, they speak only about the release of the Israeli soldier. The Palestinian prisoners to be freed are just objects, merchandise, not human beings. But don’t they also count the days, like their parents and their children?

The greatest obstacle to such an exchange is mental, a matter of language. If it had been about “Palestinian fighters” there would have been no problem. The release of fighters in exchange for a fighter. But our government – like all colonial governments before it – cannot recognize local insurgents as “fighters” who act in the service of their people. The colonial ethos – like the “ethical code” of our ethical Professor Assa Kasher – demands that they be called “terrorists” with “blood on their hands”, base criminals, vile murderers.

A touching Irish song tells of an Irish freedom fighters who, on the morning of his execution, asks to be treated like an “Irish soldier” and be shot, not “hanged like a dog”. His request was denied.

When one speaks about the release of “hundreds of murderers” in exchange for an Israeli soldier, one runs up against a huge psychological obstacle. Life and death in the power of the tongue.

In several respects, the Gilad Shalit affair can be seen as a metaphor for the entire historical conflict.

Charged words dictate the behavior of the leaders. The different and opposing narratives prevent an understanding between the parties even about minor matters. The psychological obstacles are immense.

The great propaganda advantage of the Israeli government, so clearly shown in the Shalit affair, is now also being tested in the matter of the Goldstone report. The efforts of the Israeli government to prevent the referral of the report to the UN Security Council or General Assembly, or to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, are now supported by President Barack Obama and the European leaders. The inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, like the Palestinians in Israeli jails, have become mere tokens, objects without a human face.

And about Gilad Shalit: the negotiations must be speeded up so as to effect a prisoner exchange in the very nearest future. Until then, the mediators should be given an unequivocal undertaking that there will be no effort to free him by force, in return for an agreement by Hamas to let him meet with Red Cross personnel, and perhaps also with his family.

Everything else is manipulation and lip service.

Ron Jacobs: Hi Marc, let me start with what seems to me to be an obvious question. Your newest book, Good Doctor Guillotin, is, among other things, a meditation on capital punishment. I’m guessing that your work opposing this form of punishment is part of what compelled you to write the novel. Yet, the story is about the invention of the guillotine. Can you talk about how these two sentiments (if that’s what they are) coincide and contradict each other?

Marc Estrin: It’s true that I think of this as “my death-penalty book”. As you know, Vermont has been under pressure from the feds to change its no-death-penalty stance to one conforming more to administration positions concerning capital punishment, and federal prosecutors continue to push for death as an option for federal capital crimes (crimes crossing state boundaries) tried in Vermont, trying to habituate Vermont juries to handing out death sentences, and the public to pressure the legislature to change Vermont statutes prohibiting them. I have written a reflection on a recent local capital trial which may be seen here.

Although the public seems to be less enthusiastic about the death penalty in the last two years, it is with us nevertheless (sometimes shockingly so as in the (upcoming) execution of the likely innocent Troy Davis), and the issue still needs work before we belatedly join the vast majority of nations in abolition.

How, then, to do that work? As with Skulk, my attempted end-run around the general censorship of 9/11 truth, The Good Doctor Guillotin is a reaching out beyond-the-choir of abolitionist regulars to a more general fiction reader who may not ever think about the issue. I had to think about the best way to involve such a person.

My hint was a strong reaction by several readers to the Sacco-Vanzetti chapter in Insect Dreams – that plus my own revulsion at a government planning and accomplishing the death of one of its citizens. It seems that detailed recounting of the prelude and countdown to an execution has strong, affective fascination, usually accompanied by a kind of identifying fear and horror often absent when we read reports of executions elsewhere. The end of A Tale of Two Cities is perhaps the supreme example.

That book certainly contributed to my choice of the French Revolution as a setting for an execution, but more than that was the stark theme of good intentions making things worse, humane science evolving into terror. Modern “improvements” in execution techniques — hanging to electric chair to gas to lethal injection – are motivated by far more technical and less revealing considerations, and so Guillotin’s situation was a very rich choice. He was in fact a good man turned into a monster by his ameliorations. So are many of us. But he knew it, too – which is what makes him so interesting a figure.

The downside of this choice is that the book may be mis-read as simply a historical novel about the French Revolution, ho-hum, that was a long time ago. I tried to block off that reception with the inclusion of contemporary essays in my own non-historical voice.

RJ: Similarly, this book also seems to be about the nature of revolution. One might frame the question this way: how do such good intentions — Liberte, equalite, fraternite — end up so horribly? Is it because the forces that are overthrown and have lost their privilege usually attack rather bloodily in an attempt to regain what they have lost or is it merely revenge on the part of the victors that were oppressed by the vanquished? Or is it something else?

ME: Having chosen the French Revolution as a setting, I spent six months reading everything I could about it, from many different authors. Because the story was to end with the first execution, and thus before the Terror, I might have limited my research to those years of preparation. But the beyond-the-novel question of how the hell the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen ended up with mass slaughter seemed so compelling, so contemporary, so relevant to our own murderous march through the world preaching “democracy”, that I spent much time trying to understand that shift.

I’m no historian or real scholar, but it did seem to me that much hinged on the moment when the Revolution went from fighting its external enemies – the royal armies of states threatened by the demise of royalty – to, having successfully defeated them, worrying about the less visible threat of internal ones – those citizens who may be secretly plotting to overthrow, or undermine, or even think about criticism of the Revolution or a return to parts of the past. Who can know what anyone is thinking? Therefore anyone may be a suspect. And any suspect will of course declare innocence. It therefore became life-preserving to speak in a certain way, to use certain words, to wear certain clothing – like wearing an American flag pin – in order to pass. Alertness for counter revolutionaries was high, and among those in power, especially Robespierre, turned into what most would agree as frank paranoia.

“The enemy within” – a most dangerous conception to be floating free in a society. We’ve seen many examples of its destructiveness. I’ve recently written a piece about two of them as a warning concerning the current mental attitude of many Israelis concerning Palestinians. You can see that here. One telltale symptom of this pathology is when a movement starts to “eat its own children.” The struggle between Robespierre and Danton was so rich in this regard, that at least two great artists have seized upon it: Büchner, in his play, Danton’s Death, and Andrej Wajda in his film, Danton. Both treatments, though poetic fiction, have enriched understanding of revolutionary struggle.

Another way good intentions go astray is via an instinct for hyper-protection when an individual, a movement, a revolution, or a nation feels itself particularly vulnerable. Though the event was created, and the fear cynically manipulated, the reaction to 9/11 is a good example. I treated that issue in my novel, Golem Song. The Golem — a central Jewish myth — was a huge clay figure built and given life by a 16th century magician/rabbi to protect the Jewish community in Prague from a likely pogrom. Unlike Frankenstein’s creature, the Golem was built not to understand better the mystery of life, but entirely for protective, potentially punitive purposes. But like the creature, the Golem got out of hand, destroying that not meant to be destroyed. “Golemism,” I call it. I see Golemism as the global marker of our times, hyperprotection leading to hyperdestruction.

RJ: My favorite character in the novel is the hapless Nicholas Pelletier — a man for whom everything he tries ends up badly. Although he is the man for whom the revolution was supposedly fought, he becomes the blade’s first victim. Is this end meant to be just a continuation of his bad luck or is there something deeper involved?

ME: Yes, he was the man for whom the revolution was supposedly fought, but 1) was he? And 2) what else was he?

Remember that except for the year of the Terror, the French Revolution was a bourgeoise one, led primarily by lawyers and rich merchants with the striking assistance of the progressive nobility. They were fighting not for Pelletier, but to wrest power away from the nobility and the clergy. In theory, the revolution declared “the rights of man”, but it was for bourgeois man those rights were proclaimed. Some idealists (Robespierre among them!) kept the Pelletiers in mind as they made their lengthy, highly educated speeches. Some, of course, like Marat, were all about the poor, but Marat and the Père Duchêne were rabble-rousers, and the philosophers of the Enlightenment were not about rousing rabble, but rousing consciousness. Liberty, as here and now, had its limits, equality was hardly reachable, except in theory, and fraternity had its mentally gated communities. The Masonic lodges came closest to a mixing of social levels, but one can scarcely imagine a Pelletier at a Masonic lodge.

No, Pelletier slipped into being a mauvais pauvre — part of pre-industrial class of society that was beneath consideration, beyond repair, and only to be controlled by an ever-expanding police apparatus. He began as a peasant, like most of his countrymen. But consecutive years of drought and freeze destroyed much of France’s agricultural economy, and there was no government help available because the national treasury had been looted to pay for foreign wars (most notably our own revolution, a proxy war against the real enemy, England.) Where have we heard this before? Just as Obama’s rescue packages robs the poor to enrich the rich, so did the realities of the Revolution leave the Pelletiers behind.

I like the little scene where an enlightened doctor offers him the opportunity to transform from a despised criminal to a hero of science by making his detached head wink on signal. I made up this incident up, but it does reflect a grand controversy about whether there was consciousness after decapitation, and whether, therefore the humane rationale for decapitation was warranted. Note the attention to this kind of detail, while the larger question (again raised by Robespierre and only a few others in the National Assembly) of capital punishment went by the boards. Like many things today, national health care, for instance, or stopping the wars, it was considered “not politically feasible.”

RJ: While reading the novel I found myself thinking about the nature of religious faith versus the nature of scientific thought–arguably one of the battles being fought at an intellectual level during the period the novel takes place. This conflict has a revived significance in today’s world what with the rise of religious fundamentalism from Afghanistan to Topeka, Kansas. Yet, underneath the apparent rationality of science there also seems to be an element of irrational belief required for one to take the next step and accept science’s logic. Your first book Insect Dreams touched on this in its portrayal of the scientists working on the Manhattan Project. Care to comment?

ME: One of the most striking things I discovered while filling in my knowledge of the French Revolution was the central role of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in creating a counter-revolutionary backlash, especially in the western rural areas of Brittany and the Vendée. Those impassioned movements affected my choice of origin for Pelletier and his wife, and infused much of the internal conflict of the curé Pierre Grenier, the only completely invented character. His role in the novel is to illustrate precisely the anguished interactions of faith, doubt, science, revolutionary fervor, and the human heart.

Having been trained as a scientist myself, I both admire its finesse, and loathe its dismissal of the larger, if cloudier, dimensions of the lived world. The chapter, “Death by a Thousand Cuts” in Insect Dreams was my indictment of that limited world view, certainly faith-based, that science is the definitive guide to reality, and arbiter of right action. The scientists of the Manhattan Project, faced with the collapse of their raison d’être, refused to stop before testing their bomb on human beings.

This conflict, this pattern, supplies one of the continuing themes of many of my novels — the Faustian bargain: desire for knowledge and “progress” without considering the cost and consequences. Guillotin’s story is an archetype of this, our ongoing, hubristic, human tragedy.

RJ: Ah yes… the Faustian bargain. I think we’ve all made a few–at least at a personal level–to get a job or maintain a relationship. However, the ones I’m more interested in are those that we make in the political/economic realm as a people. Last November’s election appears to me as a Faustian bargain of this type. Hell, every election is a Faustian bargain of a sort. Anyhow, back to the more general one we make as residents of the United States — we know what our government, its military and the corporate/financial monoliths do to maintain our standard of living… and we support it, if only tacitly. Keeping Nicholas Pelletier in mind, one could argue that it is only the criminals and others — those that Bob Dylan called “the luckless, the abandoned an’ forsaked”–that do not make this bargain. But then, they probably make their own with Mephistopheles in another form. I guess my question is–can any human in our modern society avoid the Faustian deal?

ME: Faustian bargain:

Let’s make some distinctions because not every bargain is a Faustian bargain. The key dynamic in the Faustian bargain is a quest – for knowledge, or power, or the establishment of some ideal – with every attainment receiving some unexpected blowback, usually a just punishment.

I don’t think the US elections represent a Faustian bargain: we certainly don’t learn anything from them, nor do we get any power, nor do we further any ideal. Rather the opposite in each case. So I’m not even sure what “bargain” we, or Pelletier, or any of the forsaked have entered into, much less Faustian ones.

The dynamic there (here) seems to be pure submission to power and exploitation – which is largely the case with voters (excepting the power elite) in the US.

Given that understanding, I would put your question rather differently:

1. Can any human in our modern society get any kind of bargain at all – something symbiotically quid pro quo?

2. Can any human in our modern society find a Faustian bargain on the racks?

The first is a complex question, given the resources spent to create false consciousness. “If you protect me from terrorists, I will give up my civil liberties, and engage in torture.” I suppose that’s a bargain of sorts. Etc.

The second is also complex, though I suspect less so because the group under discussion is smaller. Who are the humans in modern society who are in a position to gain knowledge, power, or their ideals? The elite, who are usually less than knowledgeable about consequences, or worse, impervious to them. “I don’t really give a shit how many Indian farmers die, as long as my net worth goes up.” Well-funded scientists
often discover things, most often of use in keeping the power imbalance intact.

The Mephistophelian dimension to the Faustian Bargain indicates that what is at issue is supernatural power brought to bear on humans who can’t handle it. Given the secularization of modern society, I suppose we have to translate that into the dynamic between the “spiritual” innerworld, and the political/economic realm. Here, I think, bargains can be made, though given the economic/social cost of say, discovering that one should drop out of society, they may often lead to Faustian hell.

RJ: What about the bargains one makes when working for an employer like General Dynamics? Or the bargain one makes by reaping the benefits of that corporation being in the tax base? Or the bargain one makes to have a nice car and pretty skin? The quests involved may be pecuniary and venal, but they are quests.

ME: I think those are “bargains” similar to “I’ll trade my civil liberties (and morality) for your protection.” Bargains in quotes, but not Faustian ones.

RJ: Until next time. Onward.

Horror of horrors that a dying man should live longer than prescribed before he “pays” for his “heinous crime”: the description of the Scottish justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, whose “compassion” allowed Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi to go home to Libya to “face justice from a higher power.” Amen.

The American satirist Larry David once addressed a voluble crony as “a babbling brook of bullshit.” Such eloquence summarizes the circus of Megrahi’s release.

No one in authority has had the guts to state the truth about the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 above the Scottish village of Lockerbie on 21 December 1988 in which 270 people were killed. The governments in England and Scotland in effect blackmailed Megrahi into dropping his appeal as a condition of his immediate release. Of course there were oil and arms deals under way with Libya; but had Megrahi proceeded with his appeal, some 600 pages of new and deliberately suppressed evidence would have set the seal on his innocence and given us more than a glimpse of how and why he was stitched up for the benefit of “strategic interests.”

“The endgame came down to damage limitation,” said the former CIA officer Robert Baer, who took part in the original investigation, “because the evidence amassed by [Megrahi’s] appeal is explosive and extremely damning to the system of justice.” New witnesses would show that it was impossible for Megrahi to have bought clothes that were found in the wreckage of the Pan Am aircraft — he was convicted on the word of a Maltese shop owner who claimed to have sold him the clothes, then gave a false description of him in 19 separate statements and even failed to recognize him in the courtroom.

The new evidence would have shown that a fragment of a circuit board and bomb timer, “discovered” in the Scottish countryside and said to have been in Megrahi’s suitcase, was probably a plant. A forensic scientist found no trace of an explosion on it. The new evidence would demonstrate the impossibility of the bomb beginning its journey in Malta before it was “transferred” through two airports undetected to Flight 103.

A “key secret witness” at the original trial, who claimed to have seen Megrahi and his co-accused al-Alim Khalifa Fahimah (who was acquitted) loading the bomb on to the plane at Frankfurt, was bribed by the US authorities holding him as a “protected witness.” The defense exposed him as a CIA informer who stood to collect, on the Libyans’ conviction, up to $4m as a reward.

Megrahi was convicted by three Scottish judges sitting in a courtroom in “neutral” Holland. There was no jury. One of the few reporters to sit through the long and often farcical proceedings was the late Paul Foot, whose landmark investigation in Private Eye exposed it as a cacophony of blunders, deceptions and lies: a whitewash. The Scottish judges, while admitting a “mass of conflicting evidence” and rejecting the fantasies of the CIA informer, found Megrahi guilty on hearsay and unproven circumstance.. Their 90-page “opinion”, wrote Foot, “is a remarkable document that claims an honored place in the history of British miscarriages of justice”. (Lockerbie — the Flight from Justice by Paul Foot can be downloaded from www.private-eye.co.uk for £5).

Foot reported that most of the staff of the US embassy in Moscow who had reserved seats on Pan Am flights from Frankfurt canceled their bookings when they were alerted by US intelligence that a terrorist attack was planned. He named Margaret Thatcher the “architect” of the cover-up after revealing that she killed the independent inquiry her transport secretary Cecil Parkinson had promised the Lockerbie families; and in a phone call to President George Bush Sr. on 11 January 1990, she agreed to “low-key” the disaster after their intelligence services had reported “beyond doubt” that the Lockerbie bomb had been placed by a Palestinian group contracted by Tehran as a reprisal for the shooting down of an Iranian airliner by a US warship in Iranian territorial waters. Among the 290 dead were 66 children. In 1990, the ship’s captain was awarded the Legion of Merit by Bush Sr “for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service as commanding officer.”

Perversely, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1991, Bush needed Iran’s support as he built a “coalition” to expel his wayward client from an American oil colony. The only country that defied Bush and backed Iraq was Libya. “Like lazy and overfed fish,” wrote Foot, “the British media jumped to the bait. In almost unanimous chorus, they engaged in furious vilification and op en warmongering against Libya.” The framing of Libya for the Lockerbie crime was inevitable. Since then, a US Defense Intelligence Agency report, obtained under Freedom of Information, has confirmed these truths and identified the likely bomber; it was to be centerpiece of Megrahi’s defense.

In 2007, the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission referred Megrahi’s case for appeal. “The commission is of the view,” said its chairman, Dr Graham Forbes, “that based upon our lengthy investigations, the new evidence we have found and other evidence which was not before the trial court, that the applicant may have suffered a miscarriage of justice.”

The words “miscarriage of justice” are missing entirely from the current furor, with Kenny MacAskill reassuring the baying mob that the scapegoat will soon face justice from that “higher power.” What a disgrace.

But two key words seem to have survived the attrition and withstood the test of time: imperialism and financialism.¹

Talk of imperialism and financialism – and particularly of the nexus between them – remains as catchy as ever. Marxists of different colours – from classical, to neo to post – find the two terms expedient, if not indispensable. Radical anarchists, conservative Stalinists and distinguished academics of various denominations all continue to use and debate them.

The views of course differ greatly, but there is a common thread: for most Marxists, imperialism and financialism are prime causes of our worldly ills. Their nexus is said to explain capitalist development and underdevelopment; it underlies capitalist power and contradictions; and it drives capitalist globalization, its regional realignment and local dynamics. It is a fit-all logo for street demonstrators and a generic battle cry for armchair analysts.

The secret behind this staying power is flexibility. Over the years, the concepts of imperialism and financialism have changed more or less beyond recognition, as a result of which the link between them nowadays connotes something totally different from what it meant a century ago.

The purpose of this article is to outline this chameleon-like transformation, to assess what is left of the nexus and to ask whether this nexus is still worth keeping.

Empire and Finance

The twin notions of imperialism and financialism emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. The backdrop is familiar enough. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, the leading European powers were busy taking over large tracts of non-capitalist territory around the world. At the same time, their own political economies were being fundamentally transformed. Since the two developments unfolded hand in hand, it was only natural for theorists to ask whether they were related – and if so, how and why.

The most influential explanation came from a British left liberal, John Hobson, whose work on the subject was later extended and modified by Marxists such as Rosa Luxemburg, Rudolf Hilferding, Vladimir Lenin and Karl Kautsky, among others.²

Framed in a nutshell, the basic argument rested on the belief that capitalism had changed: originally ‘industrial’ and ‘competitive’, the system had become ‘financial’ and ‘monopolistic’.

This transformation, said the theorists, had two crucial effects. First, the process of monopolization and the centralization of capital in the hands of the large financiers made the distribution of income far more unequal, and that greater inequality restricted the purchasing power of workers relative to the productive potential of the system. As a result of this imbalance, there emerged the spectre of ‘surplus capital’, excess funds that could not be invested profitably in the home market. And since this ‘surplus capital’ could not be disposed of domestically, it forced capitalists to look for foreign outlets, particularly in pristine, pre-capitalist regions.

Second, the centralization of capital altered the political landscape. Instead of the night-watchman government of the laissez-faire epoch, there emerged a strong, active state. The laissez-faire capitalists of the earlier era saw little reason to share their profits with the state and therefore glorified the frugality of a small central administration and minimal taxation. But the new state was no longer run by hands-off liberals. Instead, it was dominated and manipulated by an aggressive oligarchy of ‘finance capital’ – a coalition of large bankers, leading industrialists, war mongers and speculators who needed a strong state that would crack down on domestic opposition and embark on foreign military adventures.

And so emerged the nexus between imperialism and financialism. The concentrated financialized economy, went the argument, requires pre-capitalist colonies where surplus capital can be invested profitably; and the cabal of finance capital, now in the political driver’s seat, is able to push the state into an international imperialist struggle to obtain those colonies.

At the time, this thesis was not only totally new and highly sophisticated; it also fit closely with the unfolding of events. It gave an elegant explanation for the imperial bellicosity of the late nineteenth century, and it neatly accounted for the circumstances leading to the great imperial conflict of the first ‘World War’. There were of course other explanations for that war – from realist/statist, to liberal, to geopolitical, to psychological.³ But for most intellectuals, these alternative explications seemed too partial or instrumental compared to the sweeping inevitability offered by the nexus of empire and finance.

History, though, kept changing, and soon enough both the theory and its basic concepts had to be altered.

Monopoly Capital

The end of the Second World War brought three major transformations. First, the nature of international conflict changed completely. Instead of a violent inter-capitalist struggle, there emerged a Cold War between the former imperial powers on the one hand and the (very imperial) Soviet bloc on the other (with plenty of hot proxy conflicts flaring up in the outlying areas). Second, the relationship between core and periphery was radically altered. Outright conquest and territorial imperialism gave way to decolonization, while tax-collecting navies were replaced by the more sophisticated tools of foreign aid and foreign direct investment (FDI). Third and finally, the political economies of the core countries themselves were reorganized. Instead of the volatile laissez-faire regime, there arose a large welfare-warfare state whose ‘interventionist’ ideologies and counter-cyclical policies managed to reduce instability and boost domestic growth.

On the face of it, this new constellation made talk of finance-driven imperialism seem outdated if not totally irrelevant. But the theorists didn’t give up the nexus. Instead, they gave it a new meaning.

The revised link was articulated most fully by the Monopoly Capital School associated with the New York journal Monthly Review.⁴ Capitalism, argued the writers of this school, remains haunted by a lack of profitable investment outlets. And that problem, along with its solution, can no longer be explained in classical Marxist terms.

The shift from competition to oligopoly that began in the late nineteenth century, these writers claimed, was now complete. And that shift meant that Marx’s ‘labour theory of value’ and his notion of ‘surplus value’ had become more or less irrelevant to capitalist pricing.

In the brave new world of oligopolies, the emphasis on non-price competition speeds up the pace of technical change and efficiency gains, making commodities cheaper and cheaper to produce. But unlike in a competitive system, these rapid cost reductions do not translate into falling prices. The prevalence of oligopolies creates a built-in inflationary bias which, despite falling costs, makes prices move up and sometimes sideways, but rarely if ever down.

This growing divergence between falling costs and rising prices increases the income share of capitalists, and that increase reverses the underlying course of capitalism. Marx believed that the combination of ever-growing mechanization and ruthless competition creates a ‘tendency of the rate of profit to fall’. But the substitution of monopoly capitalism for free competition inverts the trajectory. The new system is ruled by an opposite ‘tendency of the surplus to rise’.

The early theorists of imperialism, although using a different vocabulary, understood the gist of this transformation. And even though they did not provide a full theory to explain it, they realized that the consequence of that transformation was to shift the problem of capitalism from production to circulation (or in later Keynesian parlance, from ‘aggregate supply’ to ‘aggregate demand’). The new capitalism, they pointed out, suffered not from insufficient surplus, but from too much surplus, and its key challenge now was how to ‘offset’ and ‘absorb’ this ever-growing excess so that accumulation could keep going instead of coming to a halt.

That much was already understood at the turn of the twentieth century. But this is where the similarity between the early theorists of imperialism and the new analysts of Monopoly Capital ends.

Black Hole: The Role of Institutionalized Waste

Until the early twentieth century, it seemed that the only way to offset the growing excess was productive and external: the surplus of goods and capital had to be exported to and invested in pre-capitalist colonies. But as it turned out, there was another solution, one that the early theorists hadn’t foreseen and that the analysts of Monopoly Capital now emphasized. The surplus could also be disposed off unproductively and internally: it could be wasted at home.

For the theorists of Monopoly Capital, ‘waste’ denoted expenditures that are necessary neither for producing the surplus nor for reproducing the population, and that are, in that sense, totally unproductive and therefore wasteful. These expenditures absorb existing surplus without ever creating any new surplus, and this double feature enables them to mitigate without ever aggravating the ‘tendency of the surplus to rise’.

The absorptive role of wasteful spending wasn’t entirely new, having already been identified at the turn of the twentieth century by Thorstein Veblen.⁵ But it was only after the Second Word War, with the entrenchment of the Fordist model of mass production and consumption and the parallel rise of the welfare-warfare state, that the process was fully and conscientiously institutionalized as a salient feature of monopoly capitalism.

By the end of the war, the U.S. ruling class grew fearful that demobilization would trigger another severe depression; and having accepted and internalized the stimulating role of large-scale government spending, it supported the creation of a new ‘Keynesian Coalition’ that brought together the interests of big business, the large labour unions and various state agencies. The hallmark of this coalition was immortalized in a secret U.S. National Security Council document (NSC-62), whose writers explicitly called on the government to use high military spending as a way of securing the internal stability of U.S. capitalism.⁶

According to its theorists, monopoly capitalism gave rise to many forms of institutionalized waste – including a bloated sales effort, the creation of new ‘desires’ for useless goods and services and the acceleration of product obsolescence, among other strategies. But the two most significant types of waste were spending on the military and on the financial sector.

The importance of these latter expenditures, went the argument, lies in their seemingly limitless size. The magnitude of military expenditures has no obvious ceiling: it depends solely on the ability of the ruling class to justify the expenditures on grounds of national security. Similarly with the size of the financial sector: its magnitude expands with the potentially limitless inflation of credit. This convenient expandability turns military spending and financial intermediation into a giant ‘black hole’ (our term): they suck in large chunks of the excess surplus without ever generating any excess surplus of their own.⁷

Now, on the face of it, the efficacy of this domestic black hole should have made imperialism less necessary if not wholly redundant. According to the theorists of Monopoly Capital, though, this would be the wrong conclusion to draw. It is certainly true that, unlike the old imperial system, monopoly capitalism no longer needs colonies. But the absence of formal colonies is largely a matter of appearance. Remove this appearance and you’ll see the imperial impulse pretty much intact: the core continues to exploit, dominate and violate the periphery for its own capitalist ends.⁸

Spearheaded by U.S.-based multinationals and no longer hindered by inter-capitalist wars, argued the theorists, the new order of monopoly capitalism has become increasingly global and ever more integrated. And this global integration, they continued, has come to depend on an international division of labour, free access to strategic raw materials and political regimes that are ideologically open for business. However, these conditions do not develop automatically and peacefully. They have to be actively promoted and enforced – often against stiff domestic opposition – and they have to be safeguarded against external threats (the Soviet bloc before its collapse, Islamic fundamentalism and rogue states since then, etc.). And because such promotion and enforcement hinge on the threat and frequent use of violence, there is an obvious justification if not outright need for a large, well-equipped army sustained by large military budgets.

In this context, military spending comes to serve a dual role: together with the financial sector and other forms of waste, it propels the accumulation of capital by black-holing a large chunk of the economic surplus; and it helps secure a more sophisticated and effective neo-imperial order that no longer needs colonial territories but is every bit as expansionary, exploitative and violent as its crude imperial predecessor.

Dependency

The notion of neo-imperialism boosted and gave credence to a subsidiary theory of dependency.⁹ This support was somewhat paradoxical, since the lineage between the two theories was weak if not contradictory. Recall that, by emphasizing the role of domestic waste, the theory of Monopoly Capital served to deemphasize if not totally negate the absorptive importance of the periphery. But the analysts of dependency put their own emphasis elsewhere. The persistence of (neo) imperialism, they claimed, showed that, regardless of its own internal dynamics, the core still needs to keep the periphery chronically subjugated and underdeveloped.

This dependency, went the argument, is the outcome of five hundred years of colonial destruction. During that period, the imperial powers systematically undermined the socio-economic fabric of the periphery, making it totally dependent on the core. In this way, when decolonization finally started, the periphery found itself unable to take off while the capitalist core prospered. There was no longer any need for core states to openly colonize and export capital to the periphery. Using their disproportionate economic and state power, the former imperialist countries were now able to hold the postcolonial periphery in a state of debilitating economic monoculture, political submissiveness and cultural backwardness – and, wherever they could, to impose on it a system of unequal exchange.

Unequal exchange can take different forms. It may involve a wage gap between the ‘less exploited’ labour aristocracy of the core and the ‘more exploited’ simple labour of the periphery. Or the core can compel the periphery to buy its exports at ‘high’ prices (relative to their ‘true’ value), while importing the periphery’s products at ‘low’ prices (relative to their ‘true’ value). As a result of this latter difference, the terms of trade get ‘distorted’, surplus is constantly siphoned into the core (rather than exported from or domestically absorbed by the core), and the eviscerated periphery remains chronically underdeveloped.¹⁰

This logic of dependent underdevelopment was first articulated during the 1950s and 1960s as an antidote to the liberal modernization thesis and its Rostowian promise of an imminent takeoff.¹¹ And at the time, that antidote certainly seemed to be in line with the chronic stagnation of peripheral countries.

But what started as a partial theory soon expanded into a sweeping history of world capitalism. According to this broader narrative, capitalism was and remained imperial from the word go: it didn’t simply start with conquest; it started because of conquest. Its very inception was predicated on geographical exploitation and domination – a process in which the financial-commercial metropolis (say England) used the surplus extracted from a productive periphery (say India) to kick-start its own economic growth. And once started, the only way for this growth to be sustained is for the metropolis to continue to eviscerate the periphery around it. The development of the emperor depends on and necessitates the underdevelopment of its subjects.

The next theoretical step was to fit this template into an even broader concept of a World System – an all-encompassing global approach that seeks to map the hierarchical political relationships, division of labour and flow of commodities and surplus between the peripheral countries at the bottom, the semi-peripheral satellites in the middle and the financial core at the apex. From the viewpoint of this larger retrofit, capitalism is no longer the outcome of a specific class struggle, a conflict that developed in Western Europe during the twilight of feudalism and later spread to and reproduced itself in the rest of the world. Instead, capitalism – to the extent that this term can still be meaningfully used – is merely the outer appearance of Europe’s imperial expedition to rob and loot the rest of the world.

This view reflected a fundamental change in emphasis. Whereas earlier Marxist theorists of imperialism accentuated the centrality of exploitation in production, dependency and World System analysts shifted the focus to trade and unequal exchange. And while previous theories concentrated on the global class struggle, dependency and World System analyses spoke of a conflict between states and geographical regions. The new framework, although nominally ‘Marxist’ on the outside, has little Marxism left on the inside.¹²

And if we are to believe the postists who quickly jumped on the dependency bandwagon, there is nothing particularly surprising about this particular theoretical bent. After all, ‘history’ is no more than an ethno-cultural clash of civilizations, a never-ending cycle of imperial ‘hegemonies’ in which the winners (ego) impose their ‘culture’ on the losers (alter).¹³ To the naked eye, the totalizing capitalization of our contemporary world may seem like a unique historical process. But don’t be deceived. This apparent uniqueness is a flash in the pan. Deconstruct it and what you are left with is yet another imperial imposition – in this case, the imposition of a Euro-American ‘financialized discourse’ on the rest of the world.

Red Giant: An Empire Imploded

The dependency version of the nexus, though, didn’t hold for long, and in the 1970s the cards again got shuffled. The core stumbled into a multifaceted crisis: the United States suffered a humiliating defeat in Vietnam, stagflation decelerated and destabilized the major capitalist countries and political unrest seemed to undermine the legitimacy of the capitalist regime itself. In the meantime, the periphery confounded the theorists: on the one hand, import substitution, the prescribed antidote to dependency, pushed developing countries, primarily in Latin America, into a debt trap; on the other hand, the inverse policy of privatization and export promotion, implemented mostly in East Asia, triggered an apparent ‘economic miracle’. Taken together, these developments didn’t seem to sit well with the notion of Western financial imperialism. And so, once more the nexus had to be revised.

According to the new script, ‘financialization’ is no longer a panacea for the imperial power. In fact, it is prime evidence of imperial decline.

The reasoning here goes back to the basic Marxist distinction between ‘industrial’ activity on the one hand and ‘commercial’ and ‘financial’ activities on the other. The former activity is considered ‘productive’ in that it generates surplus value and leads to the accumulation of ‘actual’ capital. The latter activities, by contrast, are deemed ‘unproductive’; they don’t generate any new surplus value and therefore, in and of themselves, do not create any ‘actual’ capital.

This distinction – which most Marxists accept as sacrosanct – has important implications for the nexus of imperialism and financialism. It is true, say the advocates of the new script, that finance (along with other forms of waste) helps the imperial core absorb its rising surplus – and in so doing prevents stagnation and keeps accumulation going. But there is a price to pay. The addiction to financial waste ends up consuming the very fuel that sustains the core’s imperial position: it hollows out the core’s industrial sector, it undermines its productive vitality, and, eventually, it limits its military capabilities. The financial sector itself continues to expand absolutely and relatively, but this is the expansion of a ‘red giant’ (our term) – the final inflation of a star ready to implode.

The process leading to this implosion is emphasized by theories of hegemonic transition.¹⁴ The analyses here come in different versions, but they all seem to agree on the same basic template. According to this template, the maturation of a hegemonic power – be it Holland in the seventeenth century, Britain in the nineteenth century or the United States presently – coincides with the ‘over-accumulation’ of capital (i.e. the absence of sufficiently profitable investment outlets). This over-accumulation – along with growing international rivalries, challenges and conflicts – triggers a system-wide financial expansion, marked by soaring capital flows, a rise in market speculation and a general inflation of debt and equity values. The financial expansion itself is led by the hegemonic state in an attempt to arrest its own decline, but the reprieve it offers can only be temporary. Relying on finance drains the core of its energy, causes productive investment to flow elsewhere and eventually sets in motion the imminent process of hegemonic transition.

Although the narrative here is universal, its inspiration is clearly drawn from the apparent ‘financialized decline’ of U.S. hegemony. Since the 1970s, many argue, the country has been ‘depleted’: it has grown overburdened by military spending; it has gotten itself entangled in unwinnable armed conflicts, and it has witnessed its industrial-productive base sucked dry by a Wall Street-Washington Complex that prospers on the back of rising debt and bloated financial intermediation.¹⁵

In order to compensate for its growing weakness, these observers continue, the United States has imposed its own model of ‘financialization’ on the rest of the world, hoping to scoop the resulting expansion of liquidity. Some states have been compelled to replicate the model in their own countries, others states have been tempted to finance it by buying U.S. assets, and pretty much all states have been pulled into an unprecedented global whirlpool of capital flow.

The spread of ‘financialization’, though, has only been party successful. For a while, the United States benefited from being able to control, manipulate and leverage this expansion for its own ends. But in the opinion of many, the growing severity of recent financial, economic and military crises suggests that this ability has been greatly reduced and that U.S. hegemony is now coming to an end.

Capital Flow and Transnational Ownership

The highly publicized nature of these imperial misgivings makes this latest version of the nexus seems persuasive. But when we look more closely at the facts, the theoretical surface no longer seems smooth; and as we get even closer to the evidence, cracks begin to appear.

Start with the cross-border flow of capital, the international manifestation of ‘financialization’. This process is often misunderstood, even by high theorists, so a brief clarification is in order. Contrary to popular belief, the flow of capital is financial, and only financial. It consists of legal transactions, whereby investors in one country buy or sell assets in another – and that is it. There is no flow of material or immaterial resources, productive or otherwise. The only things that move are ownership titles.¹⁶

These changes in ownership, of course, are of great importance. If the flow of capital is large enough, the stock of foreign owned assets will grow relative to domestically owned assets. And as the ratio rises, the ownership of capital becomes increasingly transnational.

The history of this process, from 1870 to the present, is sketched in Figure 1, where we plot the total value of all foreign assets as a percent of global GDP (both denominated in dollars). The underling numbers, admittedly, are not very accurate. The raw data on foreign ownership are scarce; often they are of questionable quality; rarely if ever are they available on a consistent basis; and almost always they require painstaking research to collate and heroic assumptions to calibrate. There are also huge problems in estimating global GDP, particularly for earlier periods. But even if we take these severe limitations into consideration, the overall picture seems fairly unambiguous.¹⁷

The figure shows three clear periods: 1870-1900, 1900-1960 and 1960-2003. The late nineteenth century, marked by the imperial expansion of ‘finance capital’, saw the ratio of global foreign assets to global GDP more than double – from 7% in 1870 to 19% in 1900. This upswing was reversed during the first half of the twentieth century. The mayhem created by two world wars and the Great Depression on the one hand and the emergence of domestic ‘institutionalized waste’ on the other undermined the flow of capital and caused the share of foreign ownership to recede. By 1945, with the onset of decolonization under U.S. ‘hegemony’ and the beginning of the Cold War, the ratio of foreign assets to global GDP hit a record low of 5%. This was the nadir. The next half century brought a massive reversal. In the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher announced the beginning of neoliberalism, the ratio of foreign assets to GDP was already higher than in 1900; and, by 2003, after a quarter century of exponential growth, it reached an all time high of 122%.

This final number represents a significant level of transnational ownership. According to recent research by the McKinsey Global Institute, between 1990 and 2006 the global proportion of foreign-owned assets has nearly tripled, from 9% to 26% of all world assets (both foreign and domestically-owned). The increase was broadly based: foreign ownership of corporate bonds rose from 7% to 21% of the world total, foreign ownership of government bonds rose from 11% to 31% and foreign ownership of corporate stocks rose from 9% to 27%.¹⁸

The next step is to break the aggregate front and examine the distribution of ownership. This is what we do in Figure 2, which compares the foreign asset shares of British and U.S. owners from 1825 to the present. The chart shows two important differences between the earlier era of ‘classical imperialism’ dominated by Britain and the more recent ‘neo-imperial’ period led by the United States.

First, there is the pattern of decline. British owners saw their share of global assets fall from the mid-nineteenth century onward, but until the end of the century their primacy remained intact. The real challenge came only in the twentieth century, when capital flow decelerated sharply and foreign asset positions were unwound; and it was only in the interwar period, when foreign investment gave way to capital flight, that the share of British owners fell below 50%.

The U.S. experience was very different. U.S. owners achieved their primacy right after the Second World War, when capital flow had already been reduced to a trickle – and that position was undermined the moment capital flow started to pick up. In 1980, when U.S. ‘financialization’ started in earnest, U.S. owners accounted for only 28% of global foreign assets. And by 2003, when record capital flow and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq prompted many Marxists to pronounce the dawn of an ‘American Empire’, the asset share of U.S. owners was reduced to a mere 18%.

Second, there is the identity of the leading owners. In the previous transition, power shifted from owners in one core country (Britain) to those in another (the United States). By contrast, in the current transition (assuming one indeed is underway) the contenders are often from the periphery. In recent years, owners from China, OPEC, Russia, Brazil, Korea and India, among others, have become major foreign investors with significant international positions – including large stakes in America’s ‘imperial’ debt.

Does this shift of foreign ownership represent the rising hegemony of countries such as China – or is what we are witnessing here yet another mutation of imperialism? Perhaps, as some observers seem to imply, we’ve entered a (neo) neo-imperial order in which the ‘Empire’ actually boosts its power by selling off its assets to the periphery?

The Global Distribution of Profit

Surprising as it may sound, such a sell-off is not inconsistent with the basic theory of hegemonic transition. To reiterate, according to this theory, hegemonic transitions are always marked by a financial explosion which is triggered, led and leveraged by the core in a vain attempt to arrest its imminent decline. Supposedly, this explosion enables the hegemonic power to amplify its financial supremacy in order to (temporarily) retain its core status and power. And if retaining that power requires the devolution of foreign assets and the sell-off of domestic ones, so be it.

The question is how to assess this power. How do we know whether the core’s attempt to leverage global ‘financialization’ is actually working? Is there a meaningful benchmark for power, and how should this benchmark be used and understood?

Unfortunately, most theorists of hegemonic transitions tend to avoid the nitty gritty data, so it’s often unclear how they themselves gauge the shifting trajectories of global power. But given the hyper-capitalist nature of our epoch, it seems pretty safe to begin with the bottom line: net profit.

Net profit is the pivotal magnitude in capitalism. It determines the health of corporations, it tells investors how to capitalize assets, it sets limits on what government officials feel they can and cannot do. It is the ultimate yardstick of capitalist power, the category that subjugates the social individual and makes the whole system tick. It is the one magnitude than no researcher of capitalism can afford to ignore.

With this obvious rationale in mind, consider Figure 3, which traces the distribution of global net profit earned by publicly-traded corporations. The chart, covering the period from 1974 to the present, shows three profit series, each denoting the profit share of a distinct corporate aggregate: (1) firms listed in the United States; (2) firms listed in developed markets excluding the United States; and (3) firms listed in the rest of the world – i.e., in ‘emerging markets’.

The data demonstrate a sharp reversal of fortune. Until the mid-1980s, U.S.-listed firms dominated: they scooped roughly 60% of all net profits, leaving firms listed in other developed markets 35% of the total and those listed in ‘emerging market’ less than 5%.

But then the tables turned. During the second half of the 1980s, the net profit share of U.S.-listed firms plummeted, falling to 36% in less than a decade. The 1990s seemed to have stabilized the decline, but in the early 2000s the downward drift resumed. By the end of the decade, U.S. firms saw their net profit fall to 29% of the world total.

The other two aggregates moved in the opposite direction. By 2009, the profits of firms listed in developed countries other than the U.S. reached 53% of the total, while the share of ‘emerging market’ firms quadrupled to 18%.

These numbers, of course, should be interpreted with care. First, note that our profit data here cover only publicly traded firms; they don’t include unlisted, private firms. This fact means that variations in profit shares reflect two very different processes: (1) changes in the amount of profit earned by listed firms, and (2) the pace of listing and delisting of firms. The latter factor became important during the late 1980s and 1990s, when Europe and the ‘emerging markets’ saw their stock market listings swell with many private corporations going public – this at a time when the number of listed firms in the United States remained flat.

Second, the location of a firm’s listing says nothing about its operations and owners. Many firms whose shares are traded in the financial centres of the United States and Europe in fact operate elsewhere. And then there is the issue of ultimate ownership. Recall that currently one third of all global assets are owned by foreigners. This proportion is already large enough to make it difficult to determine the ‘nationality of capital’, and if it were to rise further the whole endeavour would become an exercise in futility.

The theoretical implications of these caveats have received little or no attention from students of hegemonic transitions, and their quantitative implications remain unclear. But even if we take the ‘nationality of capital’ at face value and consider the numbers in Figure 3 as accurate, it remains obvious that ‘financialization’ has not worked for the hegemonic power: despite the alleged omnipotence of its Wall Street-Washington Complex, despite its control over key international organizations, despite having imposed neoliberalism on the rest of the world, and despite its seemingly limitless ability to borrow funds and suck in global liquidity – the bottom line is that the net profit share of U.S. listed corporations has kept falling and falling.

The Engine of ‘Financialization’

Now, in and of itself, the collapse of the U.S. profit share – much like the sell-off of U.S. assets – isn’t at odds with the theory of hegemonic transition. To repeat, this theory suggests that the hegemonic/imperial power, having been weakened by its prior financial excesses (among other ills), will kick-start, promote and sustain a system-wide process of ‘financialization’. According to the theory, the latent purpose is to leverage this process in order to slow down the hegemon’s own decline – but nowhere does the theory say that this ‘strategy’, whether conscious or not, has to succeed.

Presented in this way, the story sounds historically compelling, logically consistent and empirically convincing – but only if we can first establish one basic fact. We need to show that the global process of ‘financialization’ indeed has been led by the United States. This is the starting point. Only if U.S. ‘financialization’ preceded, was bigger than and propelled ‘financialization’ in the rest of the world can we speak of the U.S. leveraging this process for its own ends. And only then can we assess whether that leveraging succeeded or failed.

So let’s look at the evidence.

Concepts and Methods

The initial step in this sequence is to measure ‘financialization’. Conceptually, the task may seem simple. All we need to do is calculate the share of financial activity in overall economic activity and then trace the trajectory of the resulting ratio. When this ratio goes up, we can say that the economy is being ‘financialized’; when it comes down we would conclude that it is being ‘de-financialized’.

But that’s easier said than done.¹⁹

The basic difficulty is that capitalism is mediated through money, and that fact makes every mediated activity both ‘economic’ and ‘financial’ at the same time. As we have already seen, heterodox economists bypass the problem by defining ‘finance’ more narrowly to denote activities that merely shuffle money and credit without producing ‘real’ goods and services (and obviously without generating any surplus value and ‘actual capital’). Unfortunately, though, this yardstick isn’t very practical. In order to use it, the economist needs to know which activity is ‘productive’ and which is not; and yet, strange as it may sound, this is something that economists do not – and indeed cannot – know. Despite hundreds of years of theorizing and endless claims to the contrary, they remain unable to actually measure ‘productivity’. They cannot quantify the productivity of the CEO of a large bank – or of an auto mechanic for that matter. In fact, they don’t even have the units with which to measure such productivity.

The only thing they can do is to assume. Mainstream economists assume that productivity is ‘revealed’ by income, so if the CEO earns 1,000 times more than the mechanic, he must be 1,000 more productive. Marxists reject this arbitrary assumption; instead, they stipulate, also arbitrarily, that financiers are unproductive while mechanics are productive – although this claim still leaves them unsure of how to treat actual corporations, where ‘unproductive’ and ‘productive’ activities are always inextricably intertwined.

The net result is that we don’t have a clear theoretical definition for ‘finance’ and therefore no objective way to assess the extent of ‘financialization’.

But not all is lost.

We certainly can stick with conventions – and the convention, at least among capitalists and investors, is to treat ‘finance’ as synonymous with the FIRE sector; i.e., with firms whose primary activities involve financial intermediation (banking, trust funds, brokerages, etc.), insurance or real estate.

Based on this conventional (albeit theoretically loose) definition of finance, and given our specific concern here with capitalist power, it seems appropriate to proxy the extent and trajectory of ‘financialization’ by looking at the share of total net profit accounted for by FIRE corporations. The magnitude of this share would indicate the extent to which FIRE firms have been able to leverage ‘financialization’ for their own end, and the way this share changes over time would tell us whether their leverage has increased or decreased.

The Inconvenient Facts

This distributional measure of ‘financialization’ is depicted by the two series in Figure 4. The first series shows the net profit of FIRE corporations as a percent of the net profit of all U.S.-listed firms. The second series computes the same ratio for firms listed outside the United States.

And here we run into a little surprise.

According to the theory of hegemonic transition, the engine of ‘financialization’ is the United States. This is the black hole of the World System. It is the site where finance has been used most extensively to absorb the system’s surplus. It is the seat of the all-powerful Wall Street-Washington Complex. It is where neoliberal ideology first took command and from where it was later imposed with force and temptation on the rest of the world. It is the engine that led, pulled and pushed the entire process.

But the facts in Figure 4 seem to tell a different story. According to the chart, the United Sates has not been leading the process. If anything, it seems to have been ‘dragged’ into the process by the rest of the world. …

During the early 1970s, before the onset of systemic ‘financialization’, the U.S. FIRE sector accounted for 6% of the total net profit of U.S.-listed firms. At the time, the comparable figure for the rest of the world was 18% – three times as high! From then on, the United States was merely playing catch-up. Its pace of ‘financialization’ was faster than in the rest of the world; but with the sole exception of a brief period in the late 1990s, its level of ‘financialization’ was always lower. In other words, if we wish to stick with the theory of a finance-fuelled red giant that is slowly imploding as its peripheral liquidly runs out, we should apply that theory not to the United States, but to the rest of the world!

Indeed, even the most recent period of crisis seems at odds with the theory. According to the conventional creed, both left and right, the current crisis is payback for the sins of excessive ‘financialization’ and improper bubble blowing.²⁰ In this Galtonean theory, deviations and distortions always revert to mean, ensuring that the biggest sinners end up suffering the most. And since the U.S. FIRE sector was supposedly the main culprit, it was also the hardest hit.

The only problem is that, according to Figure 4, the U.S. wasn’t the main culprit. On the eve of the crisis, the extent of ‘financialization’ was greater in the rest of the world than in the U.S. And yet, although the world’s financiers committed the greater sin, it was their U.S. counterparts who paid the heftier price. The former saw their profit share decline mildly from 37% to 25% of the total, while the latter watched their own share crash from 32% to 10%.

The gods of finance must have their own sense of justice.

The End of a Nexus?

Of course, this isn’t the first time that a monkey wrench has been thrown into the wheels of the ever-changing nexus of imperialism and financialism. As we have seen, over the past century the nexus had to be repeatedly altered and transformed to match the changing reality. Its first incarnation explained the imperialist scramble for colonies to which finance capital could export its ‘excessive’ surplus. The next version talked of a neo-imperial world of monopoly capitalism where the core’s surplus is absorbed domestically, sucked into a ‘black hole’ of military spending and financial intermediation. The third script postulated a World System where surplus is imported from the dependent periphery into the financial core. And the most recent edition explains the hollowing out of the U.S. core, a ‘red giant’ that had already burned much of its own productive fuel and is now trying to ‘financialize’ the rest of the world in order to use the system’s external liquidity.

Yet, here, too, the facts refuse to cooperate: contrary to the theory, they suggest that U.S. ‘Empire’ has followed rather than led the global process of ‘financialization’ and that U.S. capitalists have been less dependent on finance than their peers elsewhere.

Of course, this inconvenient evidence could be dismissed as cursory – or, better still, neutralized by again adjusting the meaning of imperialism and financialism to fit the new reality. But maybe it’s time to stop the carousel and cease the repeated retrofits. Perhaps we need to admit that, after a century of transmutations, the nexus of imperialism and financialism has run its course, and that we need a new framework altogether.

1. The precise terms are rather loose and their use varies across theorists and over time. Imperialism, empire and colonialism are used interchangeably, as are finance, fictitious capital finance capital, financialization and financialism. Here we use imperialism and financialism simply because they rhyme.
2. John. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1902 [1965]); Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, with an introduction by Joan Robinson, translated by A. Schwarzschild (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1913 [1951]); Rudolf Hilferding, Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development, edited with an introduction by Tom Bottomore, from a translation by Morris Watnick and Sam Gordon (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1910 [1981]); Vladimir I. Lenin, ‘Imperialism, The Highest State of Capitalism’, in Essential Works of Lenin. ‘What Is to Be Done?’ and Other Writings (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1917 [1987]), p. 177-270; Karl Kautsky, ‘Ultra-Imperialism’, New Left Review, 1970, No. 59 (Jan/Feb), p. 41-46 (original German version published in 1914).
3. See, for example, Joseph A. Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Classes, with an introduction by Bert Hoselitz, translated by Heinz Norden (New York: Meridian Books, 1919; 1927 [1955]); Barbara Wertheim Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York: Macmillan, 1962) and The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 (New York: Macmillan, 1966); and Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), Ch. 5.
4. Some of the important contributions to this literature include Josef Steindl, Maturity and Stagnation in American Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1952 [1976]); Shigeto Tsuru, ‘Has Capitalism Changed?’ in Has Capitalism Changed? An International Symposium on the Nature of Contemporary Capitalism, edited by S. Tsuru (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1956), p. 1-66. Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (New York: Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1966); and Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of U.S. Foreign Policy, 1st Modern Reader ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969).
5. Veblen’s early analysis is articulated in The Theory of Business Enterprise (Clifton, New Jersey: Augustus M. Kelley, Reprints of Economics Classics, 1904 [1975]).
6. See U.S. National Security Council, NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security. A Report to the President Pursuant to the President’s Directive of January 31, 1950. Top Secret (Washington DC, 1950); David A. Gold, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Keynesian Coalition’, Kapitalistate, 1977, Vol. 6, No. 1, p. 129-161; and Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, ‘Cheap Wars’, Tikkun, August 9, 2006.
7. Classical Marxists interpret the role of waste rather differently. In their account, wasteful spending withdraws surplus from the accumulation process; this withdrawal reduces the pace at which constant capital accumulates; and that reduction lessens the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. See for example Michael Kidron, Capitalism and Theory (London: Pluto Press, 1974).
8. Perhaps the clearest advocate of this argument was the late Harry Magdoff, a writer whose empirical and theoretical studies stand as a beacon of scientific research; for a summary, see his Imperialism Without Colonies (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2003). Similar claims (minus the research) are offered by Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (London and New York: Verso, 2003).
9. Some of the important texts here include Raúl Prebisch, The Economic Development of Latin America and its Principal Problems (New York: United Nations, 1950); Paul A. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (New York and London: Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1957); Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical studies of Chile and Brazil (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967); Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange. A Study of the Imperialism of Trade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972); Eduardo H. Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973). Samir Amin, Accumulation on a World Scale: A Critique of the Theory of Underdevelopment. 2 vols. (New York: Monthly Review Press. 1974); Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, The Modern World-System. Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974) and The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980); and Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
10. The inverted commas in this paragraph highlight concepts that the theory of unequal exchange can neither define nor measure. Since nobody knows the correct value of labour power, it is impossible to determine the extent of ‘exploitation’ in the two regions. Similarly, since no one knows the ‘true’ value of commodities, there is no way to assess the extent to which export and import prices are ‘high’ or ‘low’. This latter ignorance makes it impossible to gauge the degree to which the terms of trade are ‘distorted’ and, indeed, in whose favour; and given that we don’t know the magnitude or even the direction of the ‘distortion’, it is impossible to tell whether surplus flows from the periphery to the core or vice versa, and how large the flow might be.
11. W.W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1960).
12. The question of what constitutes a ‘proper’ Marxist framework is highlighted in the debates over the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Important contributions to these debates are Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1946. [1963]); Paul M. Sweezy ‘A Critique’, in The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, Introduction by Rodney Hilton, edited by R. Hilton (London: Verso, 1950 [1978]); Robert Brenner, ‘The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism’, New Left Review, 1977, No. 104 (July-August), p. 25-92; and Robert Brenner, ‘Dobb on the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism’, Cambridge Journal of Economics, 1978, Vol. 2, No. 2 (June), p. 121-140. For edited volumes on this issue, see Rodney Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, Introduction by Rodney Hilton (London: Verso, 1978); and T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, eds., The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
13. For a typical narrative, see John M. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation. (Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press. 2004).
14. See for example, Fernand Braudel, Civilization & Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, translated from the French and revised by Sian Reynolds, 3 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1985); Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, The Politics of the World-Economy: The States, the Movements, and the Civilizations (Cambridge, New York and Paris: Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1984); and Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso, 1994.
15. For the ‘depletion thesis’, see for example Seymour Melman, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War, 1st ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970) and The Permanent War Economy: American Capitalism in Decline (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974). A broader historical application is given in Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York, NY: Random House: 1987).
16. The generalization here applies to portfolio as well as direct foreign investment. Both are financial transactions, pure and simple. The only difference between them is their relative size: typically, investments that account for less than 10% of the acquired property are considered portfolio, whereas larger investments are classified as direct. The flow of capital, whether portfolio or direct, may or may not be followed by the creation of new productive capacity. But the creation of such capacity, if and when it happens, is conceptually distinct, temporally separate and causally independent from the mere act of foreign investment.
17. The early data on foreign assets are incomplete in that they do not cover all countries (especially smaller ones). As a result, the measured ratio of foreign assets to global GDP in the earlier years of the chart may be somewhat understated (see Maurice Obstfeld and Alan. M. Taylor, Global Capital Markets: Integration, Crisis and Growth [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004], p. 51-57).
18. See Diana Farrell, Susan Lund, Christian Fölster, Raphael Bick, Moira Pierce, and Charles Atkins, Mapping Global Capital Markets. Fourth Annual Report (San Francisco: McKinsey Global Institute, January 2008), p. 73, Exhibit 3.10.
19. For a detailed analysis of the associated difficulties and impossibilities that we discuss here only in passing, see Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), Chs. 6-8 and 10; and Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, ‘Contours of Crisis II: Fiction and Reality’, Dollars & Sense, April 28, 2009.
20. See Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, ‘Contours of Crisis: Plus ça change, plus c’est pareil?’ Dollars & Sense, December 29, 2008; and ‘Contours of Crisis II: Fiction and Reality’, Dollars & Sense, April 28, 2009.